Web support for Flutter in version ^1.9.0 is currently in a beta release. It is functionally ready for production use, provided that you’ve tested your use cases.

Please see the Limitations detailed below.

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Demo app

The easiest way to test Flutter Web support is to run the Supabase Todo-List demo app:

  1. Clone the powersync.dart repo.
    1. Note: If you are an existing user updating to the latest code after a git pull, run melos exec 'flutter pub upgrade' in the repo’s root and make sure it succeeds.
  2. Run melos prepare in the repo’s root
  3. cd into the demos/supabase-todolist folder
  4. If you haven’t yet: cp lib/app_config_template.dart lib/app_config.dart (optionally update this config with your own Supabase and PowerSync project details).
  5. Run flutter run -d chrome

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Installing PowerSync in your own project

Install the latest version of the package, for example:

flutter pub add powersync:'^1.9.0'

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Additional config

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Assets

Web support requires sqlite3.wasm and worker (powersync_db.worker.js and powersync_sync.worker.js) assets to be served from the web application. They can be downloaded to the web directory by running the following command in your application’s root folder.

dart run powersync:setup_web

The same code is used for initializing native and web PowerSyncDatabase clients.

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OPFS for improved performance

This SDK supports different storage modes of the SQLite database with varying levels of performance and compatibility:

  • IndexedDB: Highly compatible with different browsers, but performance is slow.
  • OPFS (Origin-Private File System): Significantly faster but requires additional configuration.

OPFS is the preferred mode when it is available. Otherwise database storage falls back to IndexedDB.

Enabling OPFS requires adding two headers to the HTTP server response when a client requests the Flutter web application:

  • Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: Needs to be set to same-origin.
  • Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: Needs to be set to require-corp.

When running the app locally, you can use the following command to include the required headers:

flutter run -d chrome --web-header "Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy=same-origin" --web-header "Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy=require-corp"

When serving a Flutter Web app in production, the Flutter docs recommend building the web app with flutter build web, then serving the content with an HTTP server. The server should be configured to use the above headers.

Further reading:

Drift uses the same packages as our sqlite_async package under the hood, and has excellent documentation for how the web filesystem is selected. See here for web compatibility notes and here for additional notes on the required web headers.

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Limitations

The API for Web is essentially the same as for native platforms, however, some features within PowerSyncDatabase clients are not available.

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Imports

Flutter Web does not support importing directly from sqlite3.dart as it uses dart:ffi.

Change imports from:

import 'package/powersync/sqlite3.dart`

to:

import 'package/powersync/sqlite3_common.dart'

in code which needs to run on the Web platform. Isolated native-specific code can still import from sqlite3.dart.

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Database connections

Web database connections do not support concurrency. A single database connection is used. readLock and writeLock contexts do not implement checks for preventing writable queries in read connections and vice-versa.

Direct access to the synchronous CommonDatabase (sqlite.Database equivalent for web) connection is not available. computeWithDatabase is not available on web.