Rapid Supabase CLI Setup Guide

Yes, Supabase is powerful, but hitting production for every tweak? That’s a recipe for slow dev, wasted free-tier limits, and possible oops moments.

Instead, set up Supabase locally with the CLI. It’s faster, safer, and perfect for version control. Your teammates (and future self) will thank you when everything’s reproducible and just works.

with tiny bit of setup and understanding of how things work you can make your setup solid from day one.

Install Supabase using node

I’m going to keep things simple and install it with node using NPM. if you want install it differently you can check the Supabase CLI install guide.

npm install supabase --save-dev

Initialize Supabase

npx supabase init

Start Supabase

💡

You need to have docker desktop installed on your system for this to work

npx supabase start

this will download all the docker images and start your Supabase stack locally. You would see output like this (obviously they are not my real secrets) you would get your own.

Started supabase local development setup.

         API URL: http://127.0.0.1:54321
     GraphQL URL: http://127.0.0.1:54321/graphql/v1
  S3 Storage URL: http://127.0.0.1:54321/storage/v1/s3
          DB URL: postgresql://postgres:postgres@127.0.0.1:54322/postgres
      Studio URL: http://127.0.0.1:54323
    Inbucket URL: http://127.0.0.1:54324
      JWT secret: super-secret-jwt-token-with-at-least-32-characters-long
        anon key: eujnsdfnjkafwfnIkpXVCJ9.eyJpc3MiOiJzinjsfjnsfub24iLCJleHAiOjE5ODM4MTI5OTZ9.CRXP1A7WkjnadsfonjdsfonigdDMblYTn_I0
service_role key: eyafsKJsfIgsbks80hinjoUbonCJ9.eyJpc3MiOiJzdXBhYmFzZS1kZW1vIiwichabjfjsa8oIJJnnjnlUHJk5Nn0.EGIM96ajhbjifaoiHIs81IU
   S3 Access Key: 62sdf729ahbsiouhfff351asa23cf
   S3 Secret Key: 85ojsnfosoijwfiowefvs742isdfjnfweu907
       S3 Region: local

Now we can go on Studio URL to get started

💡

I would recommend to install deno when you are running Supabase locally as Supabase uses deno runtimes to execute edge functions and installing deno and its IntelliSence extension would help you.

Connect to your production env

there are two different ways to connect to the prod environment. either you use a PAT token which you can generate from this link and use the token to login or use browser login.

Browser login

run the following command
```
 npx supabase login
```
Output
```
 Hello from Supabase! Press Enter to open browser and login automatically.
```
If you are logged into Supabase in your browser you should see this screen on the browser.

now go back to your command line and enter the code. This would automatically create PAT token for you and set it in your local env.
Manually generating PAT (Personal Access Token)
- generate from this link
- run the following command
```
  $env:SUPABASE_ACCESS_TOKEN="sbp_a6cc1610147"; npx supabase link
```
  💡
  
  replace the token with your token.

Link project

npx supabase link

select the project.
enter the Database password
1. you can find the password under. Project Settings > Configuration > Database
2. hit reset password and generate a new password
3. copy that password

and you are done. now you can sync the database to production database using the following commands.

pull configs. this would pull migrations and configs from the production
```
 npx supabase db pull
```
push configs
```
 npx supabase db push
```

💡

You need to enter Database password if you have not already in the beginning.

next you run the command.

npx supabase db reset

this will reset the local database and apply all the migrations

for more details check: Supabase CLI reference

💡

Note: If you’ve made changes to protected schemas like auth in production, Supabase won’t pull those by default when running db pull — and that’s usually for good reason. Pulling Supabase-managed migrations can cause serious headaches if you're not careful.

If you need to add something custom (like a trigger on auth.users post-signup), it’s better to create a local migration (will see how to do this next), push it to Git, and let your teammates pick it up. Since the base auth schema already exists in production, make sure your migration includes proper checks — e.g., IF NOT EXISTS — to avoid blowing things up.

💡

Heads up: when i did the process for the first time my migrations did not get applied. I stopped all the containers using the command npx supabase stop and than I started them again using npx supabase start and redid the process of pulling the data and resetting the database and it worked. it may have caused because when i ran the npx supabase db reset command for the first time it started pulling docker images. even though I have ran the command npx supabase start beforehand.

Migrations

In Supabase we need to create migrations to keep things in sync with local and prod. When we make changes locally we need to create migrations for version control so other devs working on the project are on the same page and also when other people make changes we can get those changes and push it to the production.

There are two ways to create migrations.

Create migration file manually
1. Run the command
```
 npx supabase migration new <file name>
```
  example:
```
 npx supabase migration new new_migration
```
2. Add content in the migration file
  
  for example lets say we want to add a trigger, this could be anything. such as creating a table
```
 -- Add trigger to populate `profiles` when a new `auth.users` is created
 do $$
 begin
   if not exists (
     select 1 from pg_trigger where tgname = 'on_auth_user_created'
   ) then
     create trigger on_auth_user_created
       after insert on auth.users
       for each row
       execute function public.handle_new_user();
   end if;
 end
 $$;
```
3. Apply changes to local Database
```
 npx supabase db reset
```
4. Push to git for version control
  
  this helps other people working on the project get the changes
```
 git add .
 git commit -m "Add safe trigger on auth.users to populate profiles"
 git push origin main
```
5. Push to Supabase production
```
 npx supabase db push
```
6. Make changes from the dashboard and generate migration
  
  You can make changes from the dashboard. like creating tables, adding or altering columns, creating functions etc.
  
  💡
  
  There are limitation to this though. you cant run alter schema from auth and other protected schemas which are managed by Supabase from the Supabase dashboard directly. in that case you either use the SQL editor in Supabase dashboard or use the first method.
  1. Generate migration content
```
 npx supabase db diff
```
    if you have made changes related to protected schemas you need to add the schema flag and mention the schemas as Supabase don’t do it by default.
```
 npx supabase db diff --schema public,auth
```
    this will auto generate the migration based on the changes and give the output in stdout on the terminal. like the following.
    
    just copy this content
    
    you can use this to create a new migration by creating a new migration file

2. Create migration file

        supabase migration new <migration_name>

e:g

        supabase migration new schema_test

and now copy the migration content into the generated file. the generate file should be inside the migrations folder with name something like this 20250609062017_schema_test

or you can simply use the following command to write the content directly to the file.

        npx supabase db diff --schema public,auth --file migrations/20250609_add_trigger.sql

💡

I would recommend generating the file using the command as it generates accurate timestamp.

once this is done you can follow the same process as method one to apply changes changes, push to production and version control

Resources: Supabase docs

Quick and Easy Supabase CLI Local Setup Guide

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