Install postgrest with Homebrew, Nix, pacman, scoop

Project links

• Homepage
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• postgrest

Project history

PostgREST emerged in 2014 around the idea of serving a REST interface directly from a PostgreSQL schema. It grew into a community-maintained Haskell server with automatic OpenAPI descriptions, JWT-aware authorization, resource embedding, and database-driven configuration.

Adoption history

PostgREST developed a production user base around organizations that wanted PostgreSQL itself to remain the source of API structure and authorization. The official documentation lists production adopters including Supabase and several independent services.

It is distributed as a standalone server and has accumulated an ecosystem of client libraries, templates, deployment examples, and integrations.

How it is used

Users point PostgREST at a PostgreSQL database and model endpoints and permissions with tables, views, functions, and roles. Clients then query and mutate those resources over HTTP.

There is no predefined configuration-file location: the file path is supplied as the server's sole positional argument. Settings can instead come from `PGRST_` environment variables or in-database configuration. Secrets such as the database URI and JWT key are configuration values rather than a separately documented credentials file.

Why package nerds care

PostgREST is a notable example of turning database metadata into an application interface: tables, views, functions, relationships, and roles become an HTTP API without maintaining a conventional object-relational application layer.

For package users it is a compact companion to PostgreSQL, but its operational behavior still depends on careful database-role design, connection configuration, and schema-cache management.

Timeline

• 2014: The core PostgREST approach was publicly presented.
• Later development: The project added richer querying, JWT authorization, OpenAPI output, resource embedding, and operational controls.
• Current project: PostgREST maintains a production ecosystem and parallel supported release lines.

Related projects

• PostgreSQL supplies the database, schema, roles, and functions that PostgREST exposes.
• Supabase uses PostgREST as part of its PostgreSQL-centered platform.

Sources

• https://docs.postgrest.org/en/stable/
• https://docs.postgrest.org/en/stable/references/configuration.html
• https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest
• https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md