Lore

A timeline of how the supabase/supabase monorepo has evolved. Dates are derived from git log.

Eras

Init (Oct 2019)

The first commit is 1a374516de "Init monorepo" from October 2019. Early commits ("Adding sign up form", "Hiding signup") show the repo started as a marketing site plus a small Studio surface — long before "Studio" was its own app. The original layout collapsed web/ and examples/ together.

Monorepo formalization (2020 → 2021)

The split into apps/ and packages/ arrived during 2020 alongside Turborepo adoption. Studio was extracted as its own Next.js app. The docs site, the marketing site, and the design system became distinct apps. pnpm replaced earlier package managers and pnpm-workspace.yaml became the workspace boundary.

The Postgres platform expansion (2022)

Most of the upstream services that now appear in docker/docker-compose.yml matured during 2022:

• Realtime (Elixir) became production-ready and was wired into Studio.
• Storage gained the bucket and object editor.
• The first Edge Functions UI appeared under apps/studio/components/interfaces/Functions.
• packages/pg-meta was extracted so the SQL-generation logic could be reused outside of Studio.

Auth, Branching, and the platform API (2023)

In 2023 Studio gained the major platform-layer features it has today:

• Database branching (components/interfaces/BranchManagement) shipped on the hosted product.
• Read replicas (data/read-replicas/) and Supavisor integration arrived.
• The OpenAPI-driven packages/api-types was introduced; before that, Studio hand-typed platform responses.
• The Auth surface was rewritten around the data/auth/ React-Query module set, replacing older imperative fetchers.

AI assistant (2024)

packages/ai-commands became the home for LLM-backed flows — RLS-policy generation, SQL explain, completions in the SQL editor. Studio added the Assistant panel. apps/studio/evals/ was added with a Braintrust harness, and CI workflows like braintrust-evals.yml and braintrust-preview-scorers-deploy.yml were created.

MCP, observability, and unified logs (2025)

During 2025 Studio integrated the Model Context Protocol (@modelcontextprotocol/sdk, @supabase/mcp-server-supabase) so the Assistant can call tools. The Logs surface was unified under components/interfaces/UnifiedLogs/, and the Reports / Query Performance surfaces were rebuilt. The /go/* campaign system in apps/www/_go/ and packages/marketing/src/go/ formalized lead-generation pages outside the main site navigation.

Acceleration (early 2026)

Commit volume climbs sharply in 2026 (+~200 commits/month vs late 2025). Recent landings include the new Connect sheet, JIT database access, vector buckets and Iceberg storage wrappers, JWT signing keys, OAuth server apps, and split edge-function secrets.

Longest-standing features

These directories appear in the earliest non-bootstrap commits and are still actively maintained:

Feature	First seen	Notes
Marketing site (apps/www)	2019	Started as the entire repo. Has been continuously rewritten.
Sign-up / sign-in flows (apps/studio/pages/sign-*.tsx)	2019	Some auth-flow surface predates the rest of Studio.
SQL Editor (apps/studio/components/interfaces/SQLEditor)	early 2020	The most-edited component folder in Studio history.
Table Editor (apps/studio/components/interfaces/TableGridEditor)	2020	Built on a patched fork of react-data-grid (patches/react-data-grid.patch).
packages/ui	2021	Started as a small set of buttons; has migrated through multiple Tailwind / Radix iterations. The _Shadcn_ suffix marks the preferred replacements.

Deprecated / replaced features

• Old Tailwind tokens. Earlier Studio code used hard-coded brand colors. The _Shadcn_-suffixed components in packages/ui are the migration target — older non-suffixed components are gradually being replaced.
• <Toggle> → <Switch>. Migration tracked in commit a5b36d91de ("chore: migrate <Toggle> to <Switch>").
• PgBouncer. Replaced by Supavisor in self-host. The compose file no longer exposes PgBouncer.
• apps/new-docs/ — appears in .gitignore but is intentionally not present, indicating an abandoned next-gen docs experiment.
• Older "thumb" / "og" frontmatter fields in blog posts. Replaced by imgThumb / imgSocial (see apps/www/README.md).

Major rewrites

• Studio data layer (2022 → 2023). Per-domain React-Query hooks in apps/studio/data/<domain>/ replaced the previous monolithic fetcher. Today data/ has ~92 domain folders.
• Docs to App Router (2023 → 2024). apps/docs migrated from Pages Router to Next.js App Router; apps/docs/app/guides/* and apps/docs/app/reference/* are the new home.
• Auth UI (2023). The Auth feature folder under components/interfaces/Auth was rebuilt around granular components and React-Query hooks.
• Logs (2025). Multiple per-product logs experiences were unified under components/interfaces/UnifiedLogs.

Growth trajectory

• 2019: 1 contributor.
• Late 2024: >1,500 cumulative authors.
• 2026-04: ~1,917 cumulative authors.
• Recent monthly velocity is ~400-600 commits/month, the highest in repo history.