When using PowerSync, your app backend is responsible for the following:

  1. Authenticating app users
  2. Generating JWTs that allows the PowerSync Client SDK to authenticate users against the server-side PowerSync Service.
  3. Writing client-side changes to the backend database (Postgres or MongoDB)

An overview of how PowerSync interacts with your backend application.

​
Authentication

General authentication for your app users is outside the scope of PowerSync. A service such as Auth0 or Clerk may be used, or any other authentication system.

Once a user is authenticated against your app backend, your app backend needs to generate a JWT which can be used by PowerSync Client SDK to authenticate the user against the PowerSync Service.

See Authentication Setup for details.

​
Backend Implementation Examples

See our Example Projects page for examples of custom backend implementations (e.g. Django, Node.js, etc.)

For Postgres developers, using Supabase is an easy alternative to a custom backend. Several of our example apps demonstrate how to use Supabase as the Postgres backend.

Was this page helpful?

Integrate with your BackendWriting Client Changes