Database

Hardening the Data API

Your database's automatically generated Data API exposes the public schema by default. If your public schema is used by other tools as a default space, you might want to lock down this schema. This helps prevent accidental exposure of data that's automatically added to public.

There are two levels of security hardening for the Data API:

  • Disabling the Data API entirely. This is recommended if you never need to access your database via Supabase client libraries or the REST and GraphQL endpoints.
  • Removing the public schema from the Data API and replacing it with a custom schema (such as api).

Disabling the Data API

You can disable the Data API entirely if you never intend to use the Supabase client libraries or the REST and GraphQL data endpoints. For example, if you only access your database via a direct connection on the server, disabling the Data API gives you the greatest layer of protection.

  1. Go to API Settings in the Supabase Dashboard.
  2. Under Data API Settings, toggle Enable Data API off.

Exposing a custom schema instead of public

If you want to use the Data API but with increased security, you can expose a custom schema instead of public. By not using public, which is often used as a default space and has laxer default permissions, you get more conscious control over your exposed data.

Any data, views, or functions that should be exposed need to be deliberately put within your custom schema (which we will call api), rather than ending up there by default.

Step 1: Remove public from exposed schemas

  1. Go to API Settings in the Supabase Dashboard.
  2. Under Data API Settings, remove public from Exposed schemas. Also remove public from Extra search path.
  3. Click Save.
  4. Go to Database Extensions and disable the pg_graphql extension.

Step 2: Create an api schema and expose it

  1. Connect to your database. You can use psql, the Supabase SQL Editor, or the Postgres client of your choice.

  2. Create a new schema named api:


    _10
    create schema if not exists api;

  3. Grant the anon and authenticated roles usage on this schema.


    _10
    grant usage on schema api to anon, authenticated;

  4. Go to API Settings in the Supabase Dashboard.

  5. Under Data API Settings, add api to Exposed schemas. Make sure it is the first schema in the list, so that it will be searched first by default.

  6. Under these new settings, anon and authenticated can execute functions defined in the api schema, but they have no automatic permissions on any tables. On a table-by-table basis, you can grant them permissions. For example:


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    grant select on table api.<your_table> to anon;
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    grant select, insert, update, delete on table api.<your_table> to authenticated;