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Fully self-hosted deployment? #456
Description
The platform's primary goal is to securely share data across the perimeter of a healthcare institution's protected network between the patient's Opal app and their medical record in the hospital's source systems. This is achieved using a cloud-hosted authentication service and Realtime Database relay. Currently, this service is provided by Google's Firebase service.
Are there plans to ensure that Opal can also be deployed in a fully self-hosted environment (without Firebase as a requirement)?
Activity
mschoettle commentedon Mar 11, 2026
Hi @mathieugp, sorry for the delay in responding.
Great question! Yes, we intend to move away from Firebase. It is something we are currently looking into. One option is to replace it with something that can be self-hosted. Or have no extra middleware by default, and make it optional in case the backend is deployed within a protected network.
If you have any specific requirements or suggestions we can take it into consideration.
mathieugp commentedon Mar 14, 2026
@mschoettle I am afraid I cannot speak from experience, but one obvious option appears to be Supabase. Potentially other real-time databases could also do the work? If the number of GitHub stars counts, something called Appwrite comes second after Supabase under the firebase topic.
mschoettle commentedon Mar 16, 2026
Thanks a lot! Those two look quite interesting. At first, I was thinking that a message queue should work (which is basically what we use it for). However, at least right now we are also using authentication. The Firebase-alternatives might make it easier to migrate to. I'll take a look into those.
mschoettle commentedon Apr 22, 2026
Somewhat related from a comment on LinkedIn responding to John's post: https://claude.ai/share/eb804808-7917-4386-8c7a-e562e329fac5
via: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7448786742108827648/