Moving a Supabase project to another project or account

Three operations, easy to mix up

Sources: Supabase: Migrating within Supabase

The manual path, step by step

1. Step 1

   Create the new project first

   Pick the region and plan; you need its connection string before restoring anything.

2. Step 2

   Dump the old project

   The Supabase CLI runs pg_dump with the right exclusions for Supabase-managed schemas.

   export OLD_DB_URL="postgresql://postgres.<old-ref>:<password>@aws-0-<region>.pooler.supabase.com:5432/postgres"
   
   supabase db dump --db-url "$OLD_DB_URL" -f roles.sql --role-only
   supabase db dump --db-url "$OLD_DB_URL" -f schema.sql
   supabase db dump --db-url "$OLD_DB_URL" -f data.sql --use-copy --data-only

3. Step 3

   Restore into the new project

   "object already exists" errors on the default schemas are expected and safe to ignore; the new project already created them.

   psql --single-transaction --variable ON_ERROR_STOP=1 \
     --file roles.sql --file schema.sql \
     --command 'SET session_replication_role = replica' \
     --file data.sql --dbname "$NEW_DB_URL"

4. Step 4

   Copy Storage buckets separately

   Database dumps never include Storage objects, only their metadata rows.

   supabase storage cp ./downloaded/<bucket> ss:///<bucket> -r --experimental --project-ref <new-ref>

Sources: Supabase: Migrating within Supabase

What the manual path does not carry over cleanly

• Auth users dump along with the rest of auth.users, including password hashes, but Supabase's own CLI dump excludes Supabase-managed schemas by default, so this needs an explicit include or a separate step depending on CLI version — verify auth.users row counts match after restoring.
• API keys (anon, service_role) are per-project secrets; the new project has new ones, so every client and server needs its URL and key updated.
• Realtime publication membership and Storage bucket policies are schema objects, not data, so a schema-only dump does carry them if the dump step above completed without errors on those statements.

Sources: Supabase: Migrating within Supabase

A one-command alternative

Scribase's importer runs the whole move in one step against the old project's connection string: schema, auth users with ids and password hashes preserved, data, RLS policies and Storage objects, ending with a per-table verification report instead of manual row-count checks. Each project is $25 a month.

scribase import supabase --project-ref <old-ref> \
  --org acme --project app --env production \
  --connection-string "$OLD_DB_URL" --dry-run

Sources: Scribase pricing