Electric

Use it when

• Your frontend polls REST endpoints to keep client state fresh and you want live partial replication out of Postgres over a plain HTTP API instead of building a websocket fanout layer.
• You are building local-first or realtime features (dashboards, collaborative views, agents on live data) and need scalable read-path sync from Postgres that can sit behind a CDN.

What it solves

Not the fit when

• write-path sync; Electric is a read-path sync engine
• Postgres without logical replication enabled
• the optional LiveDashboard port is completely unauthenticated; never expose it publicly
• client to postgres write path and conflict resolution
• database schema migrations
• syncing from databases other than postgres

Install

docker compose -f .support/docker-compose.yml up  # from the repo root; requires Postgres with logical replication enabled, connected via DATABASE_URL

Invoke

curl -i 'http://localhost:3000/v1/shape?table=foo&offset=-1' to sync a table over HTTP, or consume via the TypeScript client / React useShape hook with a table and optional where clause.

Alternatives

No reviewed alternatives recorded yet.