Realtime Subscriptions

PocketBase includes realtime out of the box: your app can subscribe to a collection (or a single record) and receive create, update, and delete events the moment they happen. Under the hood it uses Server-Sent Events (SSE), which works through PocketBase Cloud’s HTTPS proxy with no extra setup.

// listen to all changes in the "messages" collection
pb.collection("messages").subscribe("*", (e) => {
  console.log(e.action); // "create" | "update" | "delete"
  console.log(e.record); // the affected record
});

A typical chat or feed UI applies the event directly to local state:

pb.collection("messages").subscribe("*", (e) => {
  if (e.action === "create") {
    messages.push(e.record);
  } else if (e.action === "update") {
    const i = messages.findIndex((m) => m.id === e.record.id);
    if (i >= 0) messages[i] = e.record;
  } else if (e.action === "delete") {
    messages = messages.filter((m) => m.id !== e.record.id);
  }
});

pb.collection("orders").subscribe("ORDER_ID", (e) => {
  updateStatusBadge(e.record.status);
});

Unsubscribe

Always clean up subscriptions when a component unmounts:

// remove a specific subscription
pb.collection("messages").unsubscribe("*");

// or remove all subscriptions on the client
pb.realtime.unsubscribe();

In React, pair subscribe/unsubscribe inside useEffect:

useEffect(() => {
  pb.collection("messages").subscribe("*", handleEvent);
  return () => pb.collection("messages").unsubscribe("*");
}, []);

Realtime respects your API rules

Events are only delivered for records the connected client is allowed to view according to the collection’s API rules. If a user can’t read a record via the REST API, they won’t receive realtime events for it either — so your ownership rules keep working with no extra code.

Subscriptions also support filters and expand options:

pb.collection("messages").subscribe(
  "*",
  (e) => { /* ... */ },
  {
    filter: "room = 'lobby'",
    expand: "author",
  }
);

Connection handling

The SDK maintains a single SSE connection per client and automatically reconnects and re-submits your subscriptions if the connection drops — useful on flaky mobile networks. You generally don’t need to handle reconnection yourself.

Realtime Subscriptions

Subscribe to a collection

Subscribe to a single record

Unsubscribe

Realtime respects your API rules

Connection handling

Next steps