GitHub Workflow
Advanced workflow for users requiring more control.
This is our old guide and your mileage may vary. It is recommended to use the updated Custom Actions workflow.
Before you begin, it's important that you (or someone on your team) are comfortable with FlutterFlow's workflow for managing custom code in GitHub as documented here. Using PowerSync with FlutterFlow currently requires dropping down into Dart code and merging code changes using git.
Skills needed to use this guide:
FlutterFlow
GitHub
Dart & Flutter
SQL
Used in conjunction with FlutterFlow, PowerSync enables developers to build offline-first apps that are robust in poor network conditions and that have highly responsive frontends while relying on Supabase for their backend. This guide provides instructions for how to configure PowerSync for use with your FlutterFlow project that has Supabase integration enabled.
This guide takes just over 1 hour to complete. The bulk of that time is the initial FlutterFlow tutorial.
Before you proceed, this guide assumes that you have already signed up for free accounts with both Supabase and PowerSync. If you haven't signed up for a PowerSync account yet, click here (and if you haven't signed up for Supabase yet, click here). This guide also assumes that you already have Flutter set up.
Guide Overview
Create your FlutterFlow project, integrated with Supabase
Connect your project to GitHub
Set up the PowerSync Service
Add PowerSync to Your Flutter Project
Lifecycle / Maintenance Considerations
Create Your FlutterFlow Project
This guide assumes you are starting off by following FlutterFlow's tutorial 'Build a Notes App With FlutterFlow and Supabase'. Some small changes are required to this tutorial to bring it up to date with the latest Supabase, and to make adding PowerSync simpler:
Create your
notes
table using theUUID
type for yourid
column instead ofint
. It's simpler to work with UUID based primary key columns in PowerSync.Disable Row Level Security (RLS) in Step 3 - Creating the
notes
table. Since the FlutterFlow tutorial was published, RLS is now mandatory for new tables created in Supabase. This is for development purposes only — it's important to use RLS in production.Enable insert permissions for the Storage object in Step 4 - Creating a Storage Bucket. Without this, users won't be able to upload images.
In Step 10 - Displaying Data in the UI, pass the
id
column as a parameter instead of the entire row
Connect Your Project to GitHub
Follow FlutterFlow's instructions published here: Manage Custom Code In GitHub
It's a good idea to make sure you can launch your app using
flutter run
at this point.
Set Up the PowerSync Service
In your Supabase project's SQL console, run the following:
Connect PowerSync to your Supabase environment, as detailed in our Supabase Guide.
Deploy the below Sync Rules:
PowerSync Flutter Integration
At a high level, the steps required in your Flutter code are as follows:
Install the PowerSync Dart package
Import helper functions
Define your app schema
Smoke test
Define your models
Connect your UI
All of the work in this section will be performed on the develop
branch that you should have set up at this point.
Install PowerSync
Add the powersync Dart package to your
pubspec.yaml
file:powersync: ^0.4.1
It's also useful having a decent Logging framework in your app, so we also recommend adding
logging: ^1.1.1
Run
flutter pub get
and iteratively resolve any dependency issues, for example updatingflutter_cache_manager: 3.3.0
toflutter_cache_manager: ^3.3.0
See this commit to see exactly which dependencies we had to resolve.
Note: The FlutterFlow team are always updating their platform, so the exact dependencies that you will need to update may differ.
Import Helper Functions
Create a new file
lib/powersync/powersync.dart
and copy the contents of this file:
Replace the default value of
powersyncUrl
on line 12 with the value of your PowerSync Service Instance — you can obtain this by opening your Instance properties and copying the value of "Instance URL":Make the following changes in
lib/main.dart
:Add the following imports:
import 'package:flutter/foundation.dart';
import './powersync/powersync.dart';
import 'package:logging/logging.dart';
Add the below snippet and test query immediately before
runApp(MyApp())
:
Define App Schema
Import the following file into your project, it should be located in lib/powersync/models.schema.dart
:
Smoke Test
At this point, you can launch your app using flutter run
and you should see some 'notes' rows from your Supabase being printed out on the console! Something like this:
Define Your Models
FlutterFlow generates some models in backend/supabase/database/tables
— we complement these by implementing our own offline-first models with static access methods.
Import the following 'notes' model into your project:
Connect Your UI
Generally speaking, you'll want to replace any Supabase calls in your UI to use the newly implemented methods from the appropriate models defined in the previous step.
In this app, we need to update three pages: home_list_page
, note_display_page
and create_note_page
. It's recommended to do these one at a time.
Notes Display Page
Copy the changes from this commit into your notes display page.
This is a big milestone. At this point, force-quit your app, place your test device into airplane mode and relaunch your app. You should see your notes page being populated — all from your local SQLite database 🎉
Run your app and verify whether you can launch and see your notes list without connectivity (i.e. in offline mode).
Then repeat the steps for the note display and create note pages (link to commit).
Additional Resources
For more information, explore the PowerSync docs or join us on our community Discord where our team is always available to answer questions.
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