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Migrate from Render to Supabase

Render is a popular Web Hosting service in the online services category that also has a managed Postgres service. Render has a great developer experience, allowing users to deploy straight from GitHub or GitLab. This is the core of their product and they do it really well. However, when it comes to Postgres databases, it may not be the best option.

Supabase is one of the best free alternative to Render Postgres. Supabase provide all the backend features developers need to build a product: a Postgres database, authentication, instant APIs, edge functions, realtime subscriptions, and storage. Postgres is the core of Supabase—for example, you can use row-level security and there are more than 40 Postgres extensions available.

This guide demonstrates how to migrate from Render to Supabase to get the most out of Postgres while gaining access to all the features you need to build a project.

Retrieve your Render database credentials #

  1. Log in to your Render account and select the project you want to migrate.
  2. Click Dashboard in the menu and click in your Postgres database.
  3. Scroll down in the Info tab.
  4. Click on PSQL Command and edit it adding the content after PSQL_COMMAND=.

Copying PSQL command from Render dashboard Example:

1%env PSQL_COMMAND=PGPASSWORD=RgaMDfTS_password_FTPa7 psql -h dpg-a_server_in.oregon-postgres.render.com -U my_db_pxl0_user my_db_pxl0

Retrieve your Supabase Host #

  1. If you're new to Supabase, create a project.
  2. Go to the Database settings for your project in the Supabase Dashboard.
  3. Under Connection Info, note your Host ($SUPABASE_HOST).
  4. Save your password or reset it if you forgot it.

Finding Supabase host address

Migrate the database#

The fastest way to migrate your database is with the Supabase migration tool on Google Colab. Alternatively, you can use the pg_dump and psql command line tools, which are included in a full PostgreSQL installation.

  1. Set the environment variables (PSQL_COMMAND, SUPABASE_HOST, SUPABASE_PASSWORD) in the Colab notebook.
  2. Run the first two steps in the notebook in order. The first sets the variables and the second installs PSQL and the migration script.
  3. Run the third step to start the migration. This will take a few minutes.

caution

  • If you plan on migrating a database larger than 6 GB, we recommend contacting support to ensure that you'll have the proper disk size pre-provisioned. You can read more about how the disk is managed on Supabase on the Database usage.
  • We also recommend upgrading to at least a Large instance for the migration (you can downgrade later) to avoid running out of IO-Budget.