If you want to jump straight to the source code, here’s the link to the github repository.

Introduction

In this tutorial, we will build a simple blogging application using Next.js and Supabase. Next.js is a popular React framework for building server-side rendered and statically generated web applications, while Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative that provides a PostgreSQL database and authentication APIs out of the box. By combining these technologies, we can easily create a performant and scalable blogging platform.

Throughout this tutorial, we will cover the following topics:

• Setting up a Next.js project and integrating Supabase for authentication.
• Creating a PostgreSQL database schema for our blog application using Supabase.
• Implementing server-side rendering and client-side routing with Next.js.
• Building a user interface for creating, editing, and deleting blog posts using React components.
• Deploying our application to the cloud using Vercel.

By the end of this tutorial, you will have a fully functional blog application that can be customized and expanded to suit your needs. So let’s get started!

Setup our project

Create a new project with next.js and typescript:

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npx create-next-app@latest --typescript

Install supabase and bootstrap:

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npm install supabase --save-dev
npm install @supabase/supabase-js
npm install @supabase/auth-helpers-nextjs @supabase/auth-helpers-react
npm install react-bootstrap bootstrap

Now we can initialize supabase:

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npx supabase init

Which will create the supabase folder with the config, and finally, start all the services:

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npx supabase start

Now for the Next.js part, we need to create a .env.local file in the project root and add the following environment variables (see the screenshot below for the values):

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NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL=<your-supabase-api-url>
NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_KEY=<your-supabase-api-key>

Lets start the dev server:

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npm run dev

We are good to go!

The database

We only need a posts table with the following columns:

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create table "public"."posts" (
  "id" uuid not null,
  "title" text not null,
  "body" text not null,
  "created_at" timestamp with time zone default now(),
  "author" uuid not null
);

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX posts_pkey ON public.posts USING btree (id);

alter table "public"."posts" add constraint "posts_pkey" PRIMARY KEY using index "posts_pkey";
alter table "public"."posts" add constraint "posts_author_fkey" FOREIGN KEY (author) REFERENCES auth.users(id) not valid;
alter table "public"."posts" validate constraint "posts_author_fkey";

You can either create the table manually, or use the supabase dashboard.

Quick note on the author column: we are using directly the uuid from the auth.users table. Usually as a good practice I would create a profiles table with the id as the primary key and additionnal infos (like the name, the avatar, etc…). But for this tutorial I will keep it simple.

Lets turn on RLS (Row Level Security) for the posts table, and authorise everyone to read the table, any logged in user to create posts, and finally only the owner can update:

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alter table "public"."posts" enable row level security;

create policy "everyone can see posts"
on "public"."posts"
as permissive
for select
to public
using (true);

create policy "only logged in users can create posts"
on "public"."posts"
as permissive
for insert
to authenticated
with check (true);

create policy "only the user can edit"
on "public"."posts"
as permissive
for update
to public
using ((auth.uid() = author))
with check ((auth.uid() = author));

You can see (and actually create/edit) those policies in the supabase dashboard:

Note: no delete for now - so I’ve kept it out of the policies - but it would be the same, only owners can delete.

NextJs setup

Lets get rid of the default page in the pages folder and replace the index.tsx with the following:

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import Head from 'next/head';
const Home = () => {
  return (
    <>
      <Head>
        <title>Posts list</title>
        <meta name="description" content="Blog made with NextJs and Supabase" />
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
        <link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
      </Head>
      <main>{/* Our components will go here */}</main>
    </>
  );
};
export default Home;

As a reminder, the pages folder is a special directory in a Next.js project that contains the pages of your application. When you create a new file in this folder, Next.js automatically generates a route for it based on the file name. For example, the index.js in the pages folder, it will be mapped to the root URL of your application.

For our application, we will have the following pages:

• /: the home page, which will list all the posts
• /posts/[id]: the post detail page
• /posts/new: the new post page

In terms of structure, our src folder will look like the following:

So to recap, we will have:

• components: our React components
• hooks: our custom hooks for getting/setting data from supabase
• pages: our Next.js pages
• styles: for some custom styling
• types: for our database types

Everything is now ready, lets jump on the UI!

Next step: the UI