Making sense of search_path

In Chapter 12, I showed you how to expose additional schemas to the API. At supabase.com, alongside the Exposed schemas configuration, you’ll also find an Extra search path configuration:

Figure 13.1: Extra search path (supabase.com)

The same configuration is found for your local instance in the config.toml file in the [api] section as follows:

extra_search_path = ["public", "extensions"]

For many, this opens the question, “What does this do and what is it good for?” To answer this question, I first want to discover what the search path does in Postgres and then explain the impact of this configuration.

Comprehending search path in Postgres

The search path is not Supabase-specific. It’s a Postgres setting that is set for each Postgres database role and defines which schemas the database should look at to find data structures such as tables, functions, and views when...