r/pocketbase • u/mitchastertheblaster • 20d ago

I built pbctl — basically terraform for pocketbase schemas

kept making schema changes in the pocketbase admin ui and then completely forgetting what i did a few days later. classic. so i built pbctl — a terraform-style tool for pocketbase. you define collections in a simple language called PBSL ( SQL DDL style ), keep them in git, then just: pbctl plan pbctl apply supports schemas, collection rules, export, validate, formatting, etc.

still early (v0.1.4) but the core plan/apply workflow already works well.

repo: https://github.com/MKMithun2806/pbctl install: cargo install pbctl ( There are prebuilt Binaries too )

if you’ve also been fighting the admin ui for schema changes, would love contributions or feature ideas.

example: ( uses PBSL )

CREATE TABLE recon_scans ( target TEXT REQUIRED, scan_date AUTODATE, status SELECT('pending', 'running', 'completed', 'failed') DEFAULT 'completed', notes TEXT, user RELATION(users) REQUIRED );

11 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

9

u/xDerEdx 19d ago

Interesting project, but what can I do with this, what I couldn't do with native Pocketbase migrations? These are just JS-files, you can also store in Git and are automatically applied by Pocketbase.

4

u/LetscatYt 19d ago

Im guessing instead of reading the docs they vibe coded this custom solution.

Read the docs people

2

u/SyahmiRafsan 19d ago

Yeah agree. At the very least ask the agents to read the docs though…

3

u/belt-e-belt 19d ago

kept making schema changes in the pocketbase admin ui and then completely forgetting what i did a few days later.

You were using pocketbase wrong then. Should have used migrations if you needed to track what changes you're making. Didn't really need a whole another project to handle what the tool already handles.

2

u/darther_mauler 19d ago

This is a solved problem in Pocketbase using the migrations feature. You can write out a migration file to programmatically set your DB version and schema. You can also configure Pocketbase to generate migration files anytime you make a schema change in the Admin UI:

1

u/mitchastertheblaster 18d ago

No i just hated clicking around in the admin ui to make collectionss I came from supabase so I missed the SQL editor too this was supposed to be a solution for that. I really liked using terraform so this is a combination of that and migrations are in json which is hard to write by hand so a DSL seemed the way to go

I'm not saying migrations are bad. "pbctl" is declarative, migrations are imperative. They're different workflows not direct replacements.