Supabase Local Development: The Complete Workflow

Local-first development is crucial for building robust applications. Supabase provides excellent tooling for local development that mirrors production exactly.

Why Local-First Matters

• Faster development cycles - No network latency
• Offline development - Work anywhere
• Safe experimentation - No risk to production data
• Version control - Database changes tracked in Git

Setting Up Your Local Environment

# Initialize Supabase in your project
npx supabase init

# Start local Supabase stack
npx supabase start

This spins up the entire Supabase stack locally:

• PostgreSQL database
• Authentication server
• Storage server
• REST and GraphQL APIs
• Realtime server
• Dashboard UI

Database Migrations

The key to professional development is proper schema management:

# Create a new migration
npx supabase migration new create_posts_table

# Reset local database with all migrations
npx supabase db reset

# Generate TypeScript types
npx supabase gen types typescript --local > types/database.types.ts

Seed Data Strategy

Consistent seed data ensures reliable development:

-- supabase/seed.sql
INSERT INTO posts (title, content, published) VALUES
  ('Welcome to Our Blog', 'This is our first post!', true),
  ('Draft Post', 'This is still being written...', false);

Deployment Workflow

When ready for production:

# Link to remote project
npx supabase link --project-ref your-project-id

# Push migrations to production
npx supabase db push

Best Practices

1. Always develop locally first
2. Use migrations for all schema changes
3. Keep seed data realistic
4. Test migrations before pushing
5. Use environment variables properly

Local development with Supabase creates a professional workflow that scales from solo projects to enterprise applications.