Offline-First with CouchDB and PouchDB in 2025

(neighbourhood.ie)

55 points | by felideon 2 days ago ago

15 comments

  • matlin 12 hours ago

    PouchDB and CouchDB were what inspired me to build Triplit[1]. The idea of having an identical (or merely similar in the case of Pouch/Couch) query engine accessible on client and server is insanely powerful.

    The author links to a much longer post on handling conflicts which is worthy of its length because it's not a pleasant experience with this setup.

    I highly recommend trying a modern setup from one of the many new local first solutions [2]

    1. https://triplit.dev

    2. https://www.localfirst.fm/landscape

    • mentalgear 7 hours ago

      Great to see the founder of Triplit here! PouchDB was definitely ahead of its time, and it’s exciting to see its legacy being carried forward by so many modern local-first (lo-fi) solutions. I’ve also been a longtime fan of Triplit - its API, docs, and overall DX (plus direct community interaction) are excellent.

      Also Triplit's universal client/server model means you never have to care about all the complexity of other solutions that require to get the transformations between client db & server db just right. A really impressive piece of work! (another great one with a universal db is jazz.tools, especially if you need encryption)

      • exe34 6 hours ago

        Please let's not make lo-fi mean local-first.

    • elcritch 11 hours ago

      Nice, I’ll have to try out Triplit. There’s also Couchbase which has a local sync database in C++ IIRC.

      Also, heads up the first triplit link I tried gave me a 404: https://www.triplit.dev/docs/client/query/select#selecting-r...

      • matlin 3 hours ago

        Great catch, fixed!

    • 4b11b4 10 hours ago

      How does Triplit compare to InstantDB?

      • mentalgear 8 hours ago

        it's fully open-source for once

    • justanotheratom 11 hours ago

      triplit sounds awesome. Any precedence of someone using it from a native iOS app?

      • matlin 3 hours ago

        With React Native yes but not yet with Swift. There's been quite a few requests to my surprise through--I figured CloudKit, etc would be sufficient on iOS but I don't have experience there.

  • spiffytech 2 hours ago

    I would love to see a sync solution that didn't want to replace my datastore, or mediate all access to it.

    This approach means the tools have to be good at not just sync, but also querying, business logic, validation, authn, authz, trigger background jobs, etc. That's a lot!

    I'm not trying to eliminate my backend, nor an all-in-one frontend DB. I've tried tools that do that, and I've come to think the approach has severe limits.

    I wonder if there's not a way to offer a two-way stream of data change events, with conflict detection/resolution, which I can process with my own code.

  • k__ an hour ago

    I had quite the offline-firat déjà vu, when I saw local-first trending the last two years.

  • tty7 6 hours ago

    I used PouchDB w/ CouchDB as the datastore for a digital wallet. Used to store ZKs for proof of age etc.

    Worked a treat

  • chrismorgan 8 hours ago

    > Vite, well, it’s in the name. Fast build tooling.

    Can someone explain this to me? I’m clearly missing something about its name.

  • jimbobthemighty 7 hours ago

    CouchDB - is JD Vance a power user?