Supabase CLI

The Supabase CLI brings the entire Supabase Platform to your terminal. It spins up a complete local stack (Postgres, Auth, Storage, Realtime, Edge Functions, and Studio) via Docker, so you can develop against a real Supabase environment offline and then push to a hosted project.

Beyond local dev, the CLI manages the database schema lifecycle end to end: authoring and applying Postgres migrations, diffing local against remote, seeding data, generating TypeScript types from your schema, deploying Edge Functions, and automating project workflows in CI. Distributed on npm as supabase, it is the primary tool teams use to keep local, staging, and production Supabase environments in sync.

What You Get

• A full local Supabase stack (Postgres, Auth, Storage, Realtime, Studio, Edge Functions) via supabase start
• Postgres migration authoring, diffing, and application against local and remote databases
• Edge Function development and deployment (supabase functions serve / deploy)
• TypeScript type generation from your live database schema
• CI-friendly, non-interactive commands for automating project and branch workflows

Common Use Cases

• Developing against a full Supabase stack locally without touching a hosted project
• Versioning database schema changes as migrations and applying them across environments
• Deploying and testing Edge Functions from the terminal
• Generating typed database clients for type-safe queries in a TypeScript app

Under The Hood

Architecture - The repo is an Nx/pnpm monorepo (apps/, packages/) where apps/cli-go holds the historical Go command core and apps/cli wraps and ships it as the npm supabase package. Platform-specific binaries are published as sibling cli-<os>-<arch> packages, and the npm entry point (dist/supabase.js) selects the correct sidecar binary at runtime. Local services are orchestrated as Docker containers driven by the config in packages/config and process-compose.

Tech Stack - Primarily Go for the CLI core with a large TypeScript surface for the newer command layer and tooling, plus PLpgSQL for database logic and shell install scripts. Build and release use Nx, pnpm workspaces, mise, and Verdaccio for local package testing.

Code Quality - The project is very actively maintained (hundreds of commits per month, 180+ contributors) with dedicated test suites (apps/cli/tests, apps/cli-e2e, Vitest configs) and CI workflows. Structure is modular, splitting per-platform binaries and command layers cleanly.

API Design - The command surface follows an intuitive supabase <resource> <action> grammar (db push, functions deploy, gen types, start/stop) that mirrors the platform’s mental model. Rich --help, generated docs under docs/, and sensible defaults keep the getting-started path short despite the breadth of functionality.