RLS policies, proven - auto-generated pgTAP tests and auto seeded data (rlsautotest)

[munaf-khatri]

Hey all 👋
RLS is the security boundary of a Supabase app, but writing pgTAP tests for it by hand is tedious — you fake each identity, seed matching rows for every policy, and assert who can do what — so it usually gets skipped, and a wrong policy ships as a silent data leak.
I built rlsautotest to close that gap.

You point it at your database and it:

• reads your RLS policies from the catalog,
• generates the pgTAP tests and the seed data that exercise each policy — per table, per command, per identity (owner, another user, another tenant, anon),
• emits a native suite you run with supabase test db, pg_prove, or psql,
• and prints a per-identity access report + a CI gate that fails the build on a leak or an unprotected table.

The key idea: a generated test only means something if the data behind it matches the policy and the identity. So it works backward from each policy to the exact rows that satisfy and violate it ("reverse-predicate seeding"). "Owner can see their row" is checked against a row that's actually theirs; "another tenant can't" against a real, different tenant.
bash
pip install rlsautotest

quick check — access report in your browser, nothing saved

rlsautotest --db-url "$DATABASE_URL" --schema public --html rls-report.html

or generate a pgTAP suite to commit + run in CI

rlsautotest --db-url "$DATABASE_URL" --schema public --emit supabase/

It's free and open source (Apache-2.0), built on pgTAP and the basejump test helpers (thank you 🙏). It's beta — I've run it against real Supabase schemas and a multi-tenant corpus, and it's built to never emit a false-passing test: anything it can't prove soundly is marked, not faked.

A deeper write-up on testing RLS with pgTAP: https://unitautogen.com/blog/most-postgres-rls-ships-untested.html

Would love feedback — especially policies/edge cases it doesn't handle well. Happy to dig into any schema you throw at it.

Repo: https://github.com/unitautogen/rlsautotest