Traditionally, when you use managed Postgres services like Amazon RDS, Supabase, Neon, Heroku the Postgres vendors allow their users only a few blessed Postgres extensions. Extensions are awesome - they’re 3rd party software (plugins) that anyone can add to Postgres to expand database capabilities. There’s over 1000 Postgres extensions that add capabilities beyond core Postgres. Some of the most popular examples are:

To add any Postgres plugin to your database we use the Postgres Extension Manager, pgxman, developed by the Hydra team.

We think of pgxman like npm for Postgres extensions. pgxman simplifies the discovery and use of extensions you can easily enhance the capabilities of your applications.

Instead of managing extension versions, build and run dependencies, operating systems, and platform architectures, pgxman automatically detects and streamlines extension operations based on the local environment.

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How it works

pgxman integrates with the system package manager, ensuring the correct versions are installed without extra packages from any shared dependencies between extensions. pgxman’s automated build system creates APT packages for each Postgres version, platform, and OS supported by the extension. Extensions are built from a buildkit formula, written in YAML, and are contributed through GitHub.

While we plan to allow Hydra users to interact directly with pgxman in the future, if you’d like to add any Postgres extension to your database, please open a support ticket. pgxman makes it easy for our team to resolve your request quickly.

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Add extension to the registry

If you’d like to add an extension that it outside of the pgxman extension registry, follow the documentation to add the new extension to the registry. Once the extension is added to the pgxman registry, please open a support ticket and we can have it added to your Hydra instance.

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