A Postgres database for every GitHub branch 🤝 GitHub branching strategy best practices

Collaborative application development is super easy with tools like Git. In this video, Jon Meyers demonstrates how to use Database Branching to accomplish a similar workflow - creating an isolated PostgreSQL database for every branch in GitHub!

So you want to do Database Branching using Supabase? Jon’s got you covered. In this Supabase & Postgres tutorial, Jon shows you how developers like you can manage separate database instances for each feature branch of your application, mirroring your GitHub branches and making your life as a dev MUCH easier!

What You'll Learn:

✅ Creating Separate Database Instances: Jon will show you exactly how to set up individual Supabase instances for each GitHub branch, reflecting the separation of production and feature development environments.

✅ Database Migration Management: Learn to manage database structure changes through migration files that can be tracked and committed within your GitHub repository alongside your application code.

✅ Tips & Tricks for MUCH Easier Deployment Integration: Jon will show you some hacks for automating the process of deploying database changes and integrating them into production, utilizing GitHub actions for continuous deployment. This is essential GitHub branching strategy best practices you should follow!

✅ Local and Preview Environment Testing: Obviously, you’ll need to test! Learn how to test new database functionalities in isolated environments before merging them into the main branch, ensuring robust, error-free app releases and roll-outs. Again, a perfect GitHub branching strategy for multiple environments you should watch!

Why You Should Care About This Postgres Database for Every GitHub Branch Video:

Database branching simplifies managing database versions across different stages of development, ensuring each feature has an isolated environment. By doing this, you’re reducing conflicts and keeping your application and database schema perfectly aligned without disrupting the main production environment.

You’ll also learn:

✅ Setting up a new feature using Supabase’s branching capabilities.
✅ Adding and managing new database columns through Supabase Studio.
✅ Automating deployments and database migrations with GitHub actions.
✅ GitHub branching strategy best practices

This is your guide to making the most of database branching to ensure consistent, error-free deployments. Perfect for developers using Supabase and GitHub! We hope this video helped some dev’s out there!

💻 Videos to watch next:

👇 Learn more about Supabase 👇

📱 Connect with Us:

ABOUT SUPABASE:
Supabase is the open source Firebase alternative. Supabase provides a full Postgres database for every project with pgvector, backups, realtime, and more. Add and manage email and password, passwordless, OAuth, and mobile logins to your project through a suite of identity providers and APIs.

Build in a weekend, scale to millions.

#Supabase #AppDevelopment #RealtimeApps #DeveloperTools

[StefanRows]

You should have mentioned that Database Branching is only available on the Pro Plan :)

[dshukertjr]

This is what everyone has been waiting for!

[thorwebdev]

The GitHub for Postgres, amazing work! 💪

[nikhilpsathyanathan]

This is cool. What happens if there is a migration error?

[antonkouliavtsev]

Awesome! I was really looking forward to this one. :)

[eez]

this is awesome... game changer ..thanks for the demo.

[tananga_studio]

Good but who creates features right from the PRODUCTION branch? Can you show us normal workflow like DEV, QA, PROD?

[maloxi]

I'd love to see this kind of integration with Cloudflare Pages 😲

[bnssoftware]

Would be really helpful if you did a tutorial on how to build a Dashboard and Customer management portal similar to what you see in Supabase.

[ShadowsPowerFy]

Is it posibble to use this without running supabase locally? So i dident have to make migrations.

[cheapliquor]

This is great! Does this feature also covers changes to Edge Functions, or only to the Database?

[ThomasSselate]

Vercel creates preview links for commits, branches, PRs... Will all these work ? What if there are no new migrations, will it create a branch anyway, or connect to the main one ? Does the branch live as long as the Vercel preview ?

[dustinramsay]

Deeply needed, thank you!

How do you recommend managing migration files? Would you recommend clearing out the migrations folder on a regular basis or are they necessary to track the history of DB changes?

[tananga_studio]

Great. I wonder how it can work with mobile apps especially Flutter.

[peteredmonds]

How about Supabase Functions? Could I set up a new endpoint, perhaps a postgres trigger, and have it deployed in a preview env?

[amiranvarov]

so it is same thing that Prisma was offering in their migrations?

[dave_m]

How do I make a .supabase folder? Is it like all my supabase configurations I looked online but couldn't find anything. Great video, by the way!

[holycrimpsauce]

It’s a cool feature. But I don’t want to use Vercel personally. And work uses AWS.

[ShivanathDevinarayanan]

When i use MCP and ClaudeCode .. will it call the right branached DB or will it still write to main? whats the changes i need to do ?

[davebenjamin]

when do you expect this to come out of alpha? there's currently a warning in your docs not to use this for production systems...