Supabase / Adalo

Get Help External Collections, Custom Actions & Collections
1

Hello there,

I’m trying to build an app with Adalo, with my Supabase backend.

I would like Adalo’s native sign up / sign in features to work with Supabase’s native user logic.

What I’ve done so far before deciding to ask for the community’s help :

  • I tried by myself without any luck so far
  • I reviewed a similar post here mentionning it wasnt possible natively, but i couldn’t find more information on how to it set up
  • I watched many tutorials on the topic, which seem to suggest that there was an External User logic before, and it seems to have been deprecated since then

If there is no way to set up Adalo’s sign in and sign up natively with my Supabase auth, what would be the best way to make it work ?

What i envisioned :

  • Create a custom action GET that pings the Supabase api endpoint login
  • Get the access token
  • Redirect the user to a logged-user homepage

What i’m missing :

  • How do i store the user’s session and how do i store the access token for further authentified api calls ?
  • How do i build a logic that saves the fact that the user is logged-in ?

If there’s any chance you can help with that, I’d really appreciate it !

Thanks a lot for your help,

Nathan

2

Hi @nathanco,

A long time ago Adalo was testing “External Users” functionality. It was in beta stage, but it was possible to use it to integrate Supabase Auth with Adalo natively. You can search in Youtube with keywords “adalo external users supabase”, and there are 3 videos by Eric from FlywheelStudio.

However, later on Adalo management decided not to extend this functionality and lock it to Xano (and make it available on Team+ plans). So unfortunately there is no official way to use Supabase Auth with Adalo.

The major issue you will face is that Adalo uses its own auth system to sign up and log in, and to keep users logged-in (e.g. decide what screen to open when user opens the app - Home or Welcome, from where to get Logged-In user properties).
So in order for the whole setup to work, one of the ways is to “connect” users from Supabase to Adalo and back. What I can imagine:

  • for new users’ sign up, you create a custom action to sign up in Supabase, get back the token. If the action is successful, you run Adalo’s sign-up action, storing the token in the designated User property.
  • for user login, you create another custom action to login in Supabase, get back the token. If login is successful, you run Adalo’s login action, also storing the token in the designated property.
  • when you’re accessing other Supabase collections, you can use this token as an Authentication bearer.
  • things to watch/investigate is (a) token refresh, (b) user logout, (c) user removal.
  • security of this scheme is questionable (to say the least), but it should work.

Another possible option to explore is not to use Adalo’s Users system at all, but rather build a set of custom components which are responsible for user signup/login/auth in Supabase, somehow store Authentication token and then use this token as a bearer. I may be wrong here - not sure if this could be done.

Best,
Victor.