Auth

User Management

Supabase makes it simple to manage your users.

When users sign up, Supabase assigns them a unique ID. You can reference this ID anywhere in your database. For example, you might create a profiles table referencing id in the auth.users table using a user_id field.

Supabase provides the routes to sign up, log in, log out, and manage users in your apps and websites.

Third Party Logins

We currently support the following OAuth providers:

Apple

Bitbucket

Discord

Facebook

GitHub

GitLab

Google

Twitter

Twitch

Twilio

You can enable providers by navigating to Authentication > Settings > External OAuth Providers and inputting your Client ID and Secret for each.

Row Level Security

Authentication only gets you so far. When you need granular authorization rules, nothing beats PostgreSQL's Row Level Security (RLS). Supabase makes it simple to turn RLS on and off.

Policies

Policies are PostgreSQL's rule engine. They are incredibly powerful and flexible, allowing you to write complex SQL rules which fit your unique business needs.

With policies, your database becomes the rules engine. Instead of repetitively filtering your queries, like this ...

const loggedInUserId = 'd0714948'let { data, error } = await supabase  .from('users')  .select('user_id, name')  .eq('user_id', loggedInUserId)
// console.log(data)// => { id: 'd0714948', name: 'Jane' }

... you can simply define a rule on your database table, auth.uid() = user_id, and your request will return the rows which pass the rule, even when you remove the filter from your middleware:

let user = await supabase.from('users').select('user_id, name')
// console.log(data)// Still => { id: 'd0714948', name: 'Jane' }

Policies Are Like WHERE Clauses

Policies are easy to understand once you get the hang of them. You can just think of them as adding a WHERE clause to every query. For example if you had a policy like this:

create policy "Individuals can view their own todos." on todos for    select using (auth.uid() = user_id);

It would translate to this whenever a user tries to select from the todos table:

select *from todoswhere auth.uid() = todos.user_id; -- Policy is implicitly added.

How It Works

1. A user signs up. Supabase creates a new user in the auth.users table.
2. Supabase returns a new JWT, which contains the user's UUID.
3. Every request to your database also sends the JWT.
4. Postgres inspects the JWT to determine the user making the request.
5. The user's UID can be used in policies to restrict access to rows.

Supabase provides a special function in Postgres, auth.uid(), which extracts the user's UID from the JWT. This is especially useful when creating policies.

Policy Examples

Here are some examples to show you the power of PostgreSQL's RLS. Each policy is attached to a table, and the policy is executed every time a table is accessed.

Allow read access

-- 1. Create tablecreate table profiles (  id uuid references auth.users,  avatar_url text);
-- 2. Enable RLSalter table profiles  enable row level security;
-- 3. Create Policycreate policy "Public profiles are viewable by everyone."  on profiles for select using (    true  );

1. Creates a table called profiles in the public schema (default schema).
2. Enables Row Level Security.
3. Creates a policy which allows all select queries to run.

Restrict updates

-- 1. Create tablecreate table profiles (  id uuid references auth.users,  avatar_url text);
-- 2. Enable RLSalter table profiles  enable row level security;
-- 3. Create Policycreate policy "Users can update their own profiles."  on profiles for update using (    auth.uid() = id  );

1. Creates a table called profiles in the public schema (default schema).
2. Enables RLS.
3. Creates a policy which allows logged in users to update their own data.

Policies with joins

Policies can even include table joins. This example shows how you can query "external" tables to build more advanced rules.

create table teams (  id serial primary key,  name text);
-- 2. Create many to many joincreate table members (  team_id bigint references teams,  user_id uuid references auth.users);
-- 3. Enable RLSalter table teams  enable row level security;
-- 4. Create Policycreate policy "Team members can update team details if they belong to the team."  on teams  for update using (    auth.uid() in (      select user_id from members      where team_id = id    )  );

Policies with security definer functions

Policies can also make use of security definer functions. This is useful in a many-to-many relationship where you want to restrict access to the linking table. Following the teams and members example from above, this example shows how you can use security definer function in combination with a policy to control access to the members table.

-- 1. Follow example for 'Policies with joins' above
-- 2.  Enable RLSalter table members  enable row level security
-- 3.  Create security definer functioncreate or replace function get_teams_for_user(user_id uuid)returns setof bigint as $$    select team_id    from members    where user_id = $1$$ stable language sql security definer;
-- 4. Create Policycreate policy "Team members can update team members if they belong to the team."  on members  for all using (    team_id in (      select get_teams_for_user(auth.uid())    )  );

Verifying email domains

Postgres has a function right(string, n) that returns the rightmost n characters of a string. You could use this to match staff member's email domains.

-- 1. Create tablecreate table leaderboard (  id uuid references auth.users,  high_score bigint);
-- 2. Enable RLSalter table leaderboard  enable row level security;
-- 3. Create Policycreate policy "Only Blizzard staff can update leaderboard"  on leaderboard  for update using (    right(auth.email(), 13) = '@blizzard.com'  );

Time to live for rows

Policies can also be used to implement TTL or time to live feature that you see in Instagram stories or Snapchat. In the following example, rows of stories table are available only if they have been created within the last 24 hours.

-- 1. Create tablecreate table if not exists stories (  id uuid not null primary key DEFAULT uuid_generate_v4(),  created_at timestamp with time zone default timezone('utc' :: text, now()) not null,  content text not null);
-- 2. Enable RLSalter table stories  enable row level security;
-- 3. Create Policycreate policy "Stories are live for a day"  on stories  for select using (    created_at > (current_timestamp - interval '1 day')  );

Advanced policies

Use the full power of SQL to build extremely advanced rules.

In this example, we will create a posts and comments tables and then create a policy that depends on another policy. (In this case, the comments policy depends on the posts policy.)

create table posts (  id            serial    primary key,  creator_id    uuid      not null     references auth.users(id),  title         text      not null,  body          text      not null,  publish_date  date      not null     default now(),  audience      uuid[]    null -- many to many table omitted for brevity);
create table comments (  id            serial    primary key,  post_id       int       not null     references posts(id)  on delete cascade,  user_id       uuid      not null     references auth.users(id),  body          text      not null,  comment_date  date      not null     default now());
create policy "Creator can see their own posts"on postsfor selectusing (  auth.uid() = posts.creator_id);
create policy "Logged in users can see the posts if they belong to the post 'audience'."on postsfor selectusing (  auth.uid() = any (posts.audience));
create policy "Users can see all comments for posts they have access to."on commentsfor selectusing (  exists (    select 1 from posts    where posts.id = comments.post_id  ));

Tips

You don't have to use policies

You can also put your authorization rules in your middleware, similar to how you would create security rules with any other backend <-> middleware <-> frontend architecture.

Policies are a tool. In the case of "serverless/Jamstack" setups, they are especially effective because you don't have to deploy any middleware at all.

However, if you want to use another authorization method for your applications, that's also fine. Supabase is "just Postgres", so if your application works with Postgres, then it also works with Supabase.

Tip: Make sure to enable RLS for all your tables, so that your tables are inaccessible. Then use the "Service" which we provide, which is designed to bypass RLS.

Check authentication settings on Supabase

Navigate to Authentication > Settings on app.supabase.io, and you'll be able to change settings for things like:

• SITE URL, which is used for determining where to redirect users after they confirm their email addresses or attempt to use a magic link to log in.
• Disabling email confirmations.
• Enabling external OAuth providers, such as Google and GitHub.

Never use a service key on the client

Supabase provides special "Service" keys, which can be used to bypass all RLS. These should never be used in the browser or exposed to customers, but they are useful for administrative tasks.

Managing User Data

For security purposes, the auth schema is not exposed on the auto-generated API. Even though Supabase provides an auth.users table, it can be helpful to create tables in the public schema for storing user data.

You can read more about this in the Managing User Data guide.

Disable realtime for private tables

Our realtime server doesn't provide per-user security. Until we build a more robust auth system for WebSockets, you can disable realtime functionality for any private tables. To do this, you can manage the underlying Postgres replication publication:

/** * REALTIME SUBSCRIPTIONS * Only allow realtime listening on public tables. */
begin;  -- remove the realtime publication  drop publication if exists supabase_realtime;
  -- re-create the publication but don't enable it for any tables  create publication supabase_realtime;commit;
-- add a table to the publicationalter publication supabase_realtime add table products;
-- add other tables to the publicationalter publication supabase_realtime add table posts;

We're in the process of building enhanced realtime security.

Next Steps

• Read more about Row Level Security.
• Sign in: app.supabase.io