PocketBase can be used as regular Go package that exposes various helpers and hooks to help you implement your own custom portable application.

    A new PocketBase instance is created via pocketbase.New() or pocketbase.NewWithConfig(config) .

    Once created you can register your custom business logic via the available event hooks and call app.Start() to start the application.

    Below is a minimal example:

    1. Install Go 1.23+

    2. Create a new project directory with main.go file inside it.
      As a reference, you can also explore the prebuilt executable example/base/main.go file.

      package main import ( "log" "os" "github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase" "github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/apis" "github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/core" ) func main() { app := pocketbase.New() app.OnServe().BindFunc(func(se *core.ServeEvent) error { // serves static files from the provided public dir (if exists) se.Router.GET("/{path...}", apis.Static(os.DirFS("./pb_public"), false)) return se.Next() }) if err := app.Start(); err != nil { log.Fatal(err) } }
    3. To init the dependencies, run go mod init myapp && go mod tidy.
    4. To start the application, run go run . serve.
    5. To build a statically linked executable, run go build and then you can start the created executable with ./myapp serve.

    The general recommendation is to use the builtin SQLite setup but if you need more advanced configuration or extensions like ICU, FTS5, etc. you'll have to specify a custom driver/build.

    Note that PocketBase by default doesn't require CGO because it uses the pure Go SQLite port modernc.org/sqlite , but this may not be the case when using a custom SQLite driver!

    PocketBase v0.23+ added support for defining a DBConnect function as app configuration to load custom SQLite builds and drivers compatible with the standard Go database/sql.

    The DBConnect function is called twice - once for pb_data/data.db (the main database file) and second time for pb_data/auxiliary.db (used for logs and other ephemeral system meta information).

    If you want to load your custom driver conditionally and fallback to the default handler, then you can call core.DefaultDBConnect .
    As a side-note, if you are not planning to use core.DefaultDBConnect fallback as part of your custom driver registration you can exclude the default pure Go driver with go build -tags no_default_driver to reduce the binary size a little (~4MB).

    Below are some minimal examples with commonly used external SQLite drivers:

    Next: Event hooks