In this lesson, we will set up our Supabase project and explore its Dashboard, giving us a broad overview of all the Supabase tools available.
After creating an account with Supabase, we start with a Supabase project from the Dashboard. It asks for details about the project and the region where you want to host it.
The two important things here are the Database Password and Region. Although we can use any string as a database password, it is highly recommended to use a unique and random password for the database. The “Generate a password” feature is useful — it creates a random and unique password, statistically more secure than a manually created one. We should also copy this password and keep it in a secure location — like a password manager — because we will need this password in some later stages.
The next important thing here is the Region. Since a Supabase project is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we have over 12 AWS data center regions to select from. It is highly recommended that we choose a region geographically closer to our user base. The proximity of the selected region to our users can significantly reduce latency, providing faster response times, and thus an overall smoother user experience. For instance, if most of our user base is in Eastern Europe, choosing West EU (London) as the region would be beneficial.
It is understandable and is very common if the users are not flocked closer to a particular region, or it is unknown at the start of a project. In that case, choosing any region should be enough at this stage. Remember that, at this point, we can not change the region of a project in Supabase once it’s created. We can, however create a new project and replicate the project in the new region relatively effortlessly.
Next, we will choose the free pricing tier for this demonstration. Supabase’s free pricing tier is generous and is often more than enough for test projects. Nonetheless, we recommend at least a Pro tier for production applications.
