How Do You Build a Real-Time App with Supabase?

Let’s learn about it in a simple, practical workflow so you can implement it quickly. Need help implementing this in your project? Talk to our team today for real-time app development support.

Step 1: Create Your Supabase Project

Start by creating a project in Supabase and setting up a table, for example, a messages table for a chat app.

This table will act as the foundation of your real-time system.

Step 2: Enable Realtime

Inside the Supabase dashboard, enable realtime for your database table under replication settings.

This step allows Supabase to track changes in your database and broadcast them instantly.

Step 3: Subscribe to Database Changes

Once realtime is enabled, you can subscribe to changes using a simple client-side setup:

supabase

 .channel(‘realtime:messages’)

 .on(‘postgres_changes’, { event: ‘*’, schema: ‘public’, table: ‘messages’ }, payload => {

   console.log(payload)

 })

 .subscribe()

This code listens to all changes (insert, update, delete) and sends updates directly to your application.

Practical Insight

In real-world implementations, like those aligned with Supabase real-time app development in Dallas, this setup is commonly used for: