Learn Faunadb, Reactfire and Supabase

Dive into the world of real-time web development with this hands-on course! You’ll learn how to build a dynamic chat application using Fauna Streams and Next.js 14, focusing on the essentials and best practices.

**What You’ll Learn:**
- **Next.js Best Practices:** Master Next.js best practices for building fast, maintainable apps.
- **Server-Side Rendering (SSR):** Learn SSR techniques and master features like server actions, server side form submission etc.
- **Database Access Patterns:** Efficiently connect and retrieve data using Fauna.
- **Real-Time Updates:** Implement real-time updates with Fauna Streams.
- **Basic Authentication:** Secure your chat app with simple authentication methods.

**Course Highlights:**
- Practical, project-based learning.
- Clear, step-by-step instructions.
- Focus on modern, real-time web development.
- Tips and tricks for optimizing performance.

By the end of this course, you’ll have a working real-time chat app and a solid grasp of the tools and techniques used to build it.


Next.js is a minimalistic framework for server-rendered React applications.

Build a Real-time Next.js 14 Chat App with Fauna 

FaunaDB is a global serverless database that gives you ubiquitous, low latency access to app data, without sacrificing data correctness. It eliminates layers of app code for manually handling data anomalies, security, and scale, creating a friendlier dev experience for you and better app experience for your users.

faunadb

Now that we have user information available to us, we want to connect messages created to the users that are sending them. When we add `read` privileges to the `User` model, we can call `User.identity()` to get the user data we need to set for messages. 

Update Fauna Messages Collection with Authors

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

For user signin, we'll implement a proper server action by creating a `actions.js` file where our server actions can live. In our login page, we'll set the component to be a client component to hold some state. This way we can use the new `useFormState` hook from `react-dom` and pass in our login server action.

Within the action we'll call our `UserLogin` function from Fauna and set a cookie with the secret we get back that we can use throughout our application.

Implement Fauna Signin with Next.js Server Actions and useFormState React Hook

Now it's time to actually sign users up for our appliaction.

We'll implement the `doSignup` function that we created earlier. This function will run on the server with the `'use server'` directive so we can instantiate a fauna client and call `UserRegistration` within this function.

From there we'll redirect the user to the `/signin` page which will error out because it's not implemented yet.

Implement Signup Functionality through Fauna with Next.js 14 Server Actions

To have actual users in our application we need to represent those users in our database. Fauna has quite a few ways you can do user authentication but we'll be creating our own using a few built-in Fauna helpers.

We'll start by setting up the necessary Fauna logic for users. We'll add a `User` collection as well as a `functions.fsl` file that we'll expose user sign up and log in. Here we'll see how Fauna gives us a built in `Credentials` document to handle email and password for a user. It also has a login function that it exposes to make that easy for us which will generate a token for a user on login.

After setting up our functions, we'll add an `UnAuthRole` as well as an `AuthRole` and give proper actions for each role.

Add Fauna User Authentication to a Next.js App

To stream messages, we'll implement logic very similar to how we stream the creation of rooms from earlier.

First, we need to convert `MessageList` into a client component. We'll get an interesting error saying that only plain objects can be passed to client components from server components. This happens because the response we get back from Fauna is pretty complex. To fix this error we'll create a simple messages array and pass that down to the `MessageList` component.

In the `MessageList` component we'll create a `useEffect` that will initiate a Fauna stream within a ref and push new messages into state that we are holding in the component.

Stream Chat Messages in Real-time in Next.js from Fauna

Now it's time to actually create messages and display them in rooms within our application.

We'll start by creating a `MessageForm` component that will send a `Message.create` query to Fauna on form submission.

Next, we'll display these messages by updating our room query to also get all the messages for that room. You'll see that we can still just perform one query because we pass in the room id and call `Message.where(.room == room)` to the query.

One note here is if you console log your messages in your page component, you'll notice that the logs show up in the terminal and not the browser. This is because we are using a server component.

Create and Display Messages using Fauna within a Room in Next.js

We'll take a moment to explore how Fauna handles one-to-many relationships inside the fauna shell. 

First we'll create a `Message` collection.

Then we'll connect to the cloud database by running `fauna shell`, because I'm logged and configured this connects to the database I'm working with.

In the terminal we'll see how to create multiple messages that are associated with a room and query for those messages by room.

Explore Faunas one-to-many Relationships between Collections in the Terminal

With rooms being created and displayed on the index page, it's now time to create dynamic routes for each room so that when you click on a room name, you are actually navigated to that room.

We'll do this by using Next.js dynamic route syntax `/rooms/[...id]/page.js`. This will render a page on any `/rooms/:id` passing the component we define the `:id` as params.

Here we'll take that id and fetch the room data from fauna with a `Room.byId` query.

Create Dynamic Routes in Next.js for Chat Rooms

We can add rooms but our application does not update and display rooms when a room is added. This should happen in real-time.

To fix this we'll add a useEffect that will query for all our rooms and use fauna's `client.stream` API to ensure that this happens in real-time.

List Available Chat Rooms in Real-time in Next.js from Fauna

The first step to building a chat app is to have rooms to chat in. We'll need to create a Room collection (or table) in Fauna that we'll be adding to.

In our Next Application we'll create a simple form that has a submit handler that will create those rooms in Fauna. We need to hold some state in our component so we'll turn the page into a client component with `'use client'`.

There will be a little bit more Fauna set up to get things working. We need to create a key for our application to interact with our database so we'll create a key by running `Key.create` in our `fauna shell`. Then we'll install the `fauna` client and make a `client.query` to create the room.

Create a Fauna Room Collection in Next.js with the fauna Client

The first step is to install and configure our database that will be backing our Next.js application. We'll be using Fauna so we head over to the Fauna website and create a database.

Back in our terminal we will install `fauna-shell` so we can interact and manage our database from within our project. After some initializing steps from the CLI we'll be set up to build the app out.

Initialize and Configure a Fauna Database inside a Next.js project with fauna-shell

Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative. A service to:

- Listen to database changes.
- Query your tables, including filtering, pagination, and deeply nested relationships (like GraphQL).
- Create, update, and delete rows.
- Manage your users and their permissions.
- Interact with your database using a simple UI.

Supabase is not a 1-to-1 mapping of Firebase. Most notably, Supabase uses Postgres rather than a NoSQL store. 

supabase

In common workflows we do not want to push directly to the remote database from our machine. We will setup a github action that will run whenever we push to our main branch of our github repo. 



Deploy Local Database Changes to Supabase Remote Through Github Actions

It is common, when working on a team, for changes to have been applied to a remote database and for your local instance to be out of sync.

By running `npx supabase db pull` we can pull any changes to our remote database schema to keep our local database in sync.

Pull Remote Database Changes with Supabase

When `npx supabase init`, `npx supabase start`, or `npx supabase db reset` is run, supabase will look for our `seed.sql` file and seed our local database.

Since we have already created the project and we want to add seed data, we can run `npx supabase db reset`. 

Add Seed Data to Local Database with Supabase

With Supabase Link we can link our local project to a remote database. Then we can use the command `npx supabase db diff -f <fileName>` to create a local migration file. 

Then we use `npx supabase db push` to apply our local changes to the remote database.

Link Local Database to Remote and Run a Migration with Supabase

With the project setup, we can now start our local instance of supabase. This gives us a local running version of the supabase studio that we can interact with. 

We will create a table in called todos in the studio

Start Supabase Locally and Create a Table

With our project setup we will use our supabase dev dependency to run the supabase cli. We will login to our supabase account and then init the project locally. 

To run supabase locally you need to have Docker installed and running on your computer. To install Docker and get it setup visit this link - https://docs.docker.com/desktop/

Use Supabase CLI to Login and Init Project

Create an application and install packages 

Generate a New NextJS with Supabase App

Create a Supabase account and database quickly by going to https://database.new

Create a Supabase Account and Database

Get started with Supabase on your machine

Getting Started with Supabase Local Dev

You know when you're deep in the code trenches and need someone to challenge your assumptions? That's exactly what this is about.

Instead of waiting for someone to poke holes in your master plan, you can paste that strategy straight into AI Studio and let it pressure test your ideas. We're talking about using this tool to validate everything from your feature proposals to your ambitious refactoring strategies.

The real magic happens when you hit that microphone button. Now you're in a real-time verbal sparring match. It's like rubber duck debugging but the duck actually pushes back and makes you defend every architectural decision you've made.

Here's the workflow:
1. Drop your master plan into the system instructions
2. Tell the AI to challenge every assumption
3. Hit that mic and defend your choices like you mean it
4. Watch your plan either emerge stronger or get rightfully dismantled

This approach is perfect when you're:
- Stuck in your own head with a complex problem
- Need to validate if your approach holds water
- Want to catch edge cases before they catch you
- Looking for opportunities you might have missed because you're too close to the code

It's like having a senior dev on call 24/7, ready to challenge your ideas and push you to think deeper about your solutions.

Now go forth and get your ideas challenged. Your projects will thank you for it.


An Uncomfortable and Challenging Conversation with AI Studio

In this lesson, you'll learn how to effectively brainstorm your project ideas before working with AI agents. We'll cover:

1. The importance of having a clear plan before starting work with AI agents
2. Using traditional brainstorming techniques to gather your thoughts
3. Leveraging video recording to capture your brainstorming session
4. How to review and analyze websites for inspiration
5. Documenting likes, dislikes, and potential features for your project
6. Using AI tools (like AI Studio) to organize and process your recorded brainstorming session

The lesson emphasizes a modern approach to brainstorming that combines traditional techniques with video recording, making it easier to later process your ideas through AI tools. This method helps ensure that no ideas are lost and that your thoughts can be effectively organized by AI for future reference.

How to Brainstorm Your Project Features to Prepare for AI Agents

Many people share .cursorrules files, but trying to craft your own from scratch is a huge pain. Instead, this lesson shows you how to grab ALL community-created .cursorrules files to build a custom rule set for your projects. We'll use Gitingest and Google AI Studio to gather these examples and generate an awesome starting point customized to your specific project.

Generate Custom .cursorrules for Your Project Based on Community Examples

In this lesson, you'll learn how to leverage the GitHub CLI to efficiently search through issues across multiple repositories and use that data with AI Studio for deeper insights.

The lesson covers:

- Using GitHub CLI to search for specific issues across repositories
- Filtering issues based on criteria like comment count
- Extracting issue content and comments
- Using the collected data as context in AI Studio
- Creating practical applications like FAQs from issue discussions

The example demonstrates creating a Framer Motion FAQ by searching GitHub for issues with multiple comments, but the technique can be applied to any framework or library.

This workflow helps developers:
- Research common problems and solutions
- Understand recurring issues in specific technologies
- Generate useful documentation from real-world problems
- Make better use of existing GitHub discussions

This approach combines the power of GitHub's vast knowledge base with AI tools to create valuable insights for development work.

Search 100s of Issues with GitHub CLI as Context for AI Studio

I often find myself wondering how to use certain APIs in certain situations, and I have a couple of keywords that I try and search up on Google. And what you can really do in this situation is turn to GitHub and see how other people have actually used this code on public projects. The GitHub CLI enables us to run searches like this, and we can take the results and work on them programmatically. And inside of Cursor with their Composer AI agent, we can search for the files we want, and we can tell the agent to download them and then work on them and inspect them and teach us how those things work together.

Search All of GitHub's Code and Pass the Results to AI Agents in Cursor

Implement virtual scrolling to handle large datasets in an HTML table. Start with a basic table that renders 10,000 rows of data. The browser can struggle with this amount of DOM nodes to render at one time, especially on low end devices. 

We implement tanstack react virtual to render only the necessary amount of rows the user is viewing. The implementation includes proper column sizing, accessibility considerations, and convenient scroll controls, resulting in a smooth and performant table experience regardless of the dataset size.

Create a row virtualized HTML table with Tanstack Virtual

Learn how to implement virtual scrolling in React tables using TanStack Table and Tanstack Virtual with the useWindowVirtualizer React hook.

The most difficult tasks will require the strongest AI models. And those models simply aren't available as AI agents inside of your tooling. So the best workflows are to drag and drop the files you need to be changed and analyzed inside of a reasoning model such as OpenAI's O1 Pro, then letting it create a giant plan for your dumber AI agents to work on. The key here is that instead of just copying and pasting the entire plan into Cursors Composer or your AI agent, it's to create a file inside of your project and ask your agent to tackle the plan one step at a time. This allows you ample opportunity between each step to test and verify the micro steps along the way. Otherwise, as I've experienced many times, a session can go way off track and you burn a lot of time and burn a lot of AI requests Cursors Composer and it starts churning through a plan Cursors Composer and making lots of unwanted changes. Cursors Composer and it's to guide an AI agent to hold its hand along the way, especially through the most complex tasks. Cursors Composer and the most complex tasks Cursors Composer and the most complex tasks require a step-by-step plan.

Planning AI Agent Sessions with Reasoning Models

AI agents will inevitably make mistakes—it's just a matter of when. A key tool in your toolbox, once they do make mistakes after working on a problem for a while, is to use **git diff** to capture all of the changes they've made. 

Once you have those changes in a text file, you have a portable document that you can test against other AI models. This allows you to move the problem into smarter reasoning models with smaller context windows, helping you isolate and focus on the issue at hand.

**git diff** has been invaluable when working with AI agents because they'll often make many good changes but also slip in one tiny error. Finding that one small mistake is **git diff**’s superpower.

Leverage Git Diff to Fix AI Agents' Mistakes

AI agents are notorious for getting tasks done, but also taking some shortcuts in TypeScript, and falling back to using things like Any, which you might not want in your codebase. This creates a scenario when it's done all of the work, you've tested and verified everything, but it's left you with many things untyped. So in this situation, when you run git commit, you can set up a commit hook to expose all of the linting, expose all of the TypeScript errors. And then you just let the AI agent run that commit hook and it can find all of the mistakes that it made. And go through And fix everything without you ever having to touch the code. This lesson covers a real world scenario of a commit hook running based on a refactor that was made when extracting some types. And it shows how running commit with an agent, if you allow the commit to give exhaustive information on what went wrong, the agent can continue on and make all the changes for you.

Commit Hooks are Critical with AI Agents in Cursor

If you ever want to see data represented in a certain way, such as a chart or a graph, to better understand what's going on in the world, you can use AI's to grab the most recent data and then convert it into any visual format you want. This is enabled in AI studio with Gemini through what's called grounding from web search, structured output formatting data, and code execution, which can run Python and generate charts. This lesson is going to walk you through the challenges of using grounding, especially when working with numbers which need to be accurate. How you can use image recognition and convert that to structured output. And then the challenges of using code execution. Especially when AI's are confident that the code ran even though the code failed. At the end, we still get to generating a chart through the online editor and then we take it also to set up in Cursor in a local environment where we can run all the way through YOLO mode and just click around some buttons and get our chart.

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