Metabase

While next-forge does not come with BI tooling out of the box, you can easily add business intelligence and analytics to your app with Metabase.

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Overview

Metabase is an open-source business intelligence platform. You can use Metabase to ask questions about your data, or embed Metabase in your app to let your customers explore their data on their own.

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Installing Metabase

Metabase provides an official Docker image via Dockerhub that can be used for deployments on any system that is running Docker. Here’s a one-liner that will start a container running Metabase.

docker run -d --name metabase -p 3000:3000 metabase/metabase

You can also install Metabase by running the JAR file. Links to different installations:

• Quick Start
• Docker Documentation
• Jar File Documentation

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Database Connection

By default, next-forge uses Neon as its database provider. Metabase works great with Postgres databases so if you’re ready to connect, here’s what you’ll need:

• The hostname of the server where your database lives
• The port the database server uses
• The database name
• The username you use for the database
• The password you use for the database

You can find these details in your DATABASE_URL environment variable:

DATABASE_URL="postgresql://[username]:[password]@[hostname]:[port]/[database_name]?sslmode=require"

Next, plug your database connection credentials into Metabase:

Metabase supports over 20 databases. If you’re working with a database other than postgres and want to integrate it, check out the Metabase Database Documentation.

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Asking Questions and building Dashboards

Now that you have installed Metabase, have database credentials, you can start asking Questions and building Dashboards.