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.

  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:

For all available options please refer to the github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3 README.

For all available options please refer to the github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3 README.