Creating a takeout food order agent using Supabase and n8n - Part 1

Prerequisites: to follow along you will need:

• Mermaid Account
• Docker installed locally
• Supabase installed locally
• Visual Studio Code (or IDE of your choice)
• Mermaid Extension for Visual Studio Code
• Claude Code

Now I love curry but I have a problem, every time I order takeout I promise myself I’m going to try something new, but then I end up ordering the same thing I always order. There’s a whole world of asian cuisine I am missing out on. I think it would be really nice if the restaurant I order from had some way of making a recommendation like a waiter in a restaurant.

In this series of blog posts I am going to walk you through the steps to create a takeout agent using Supabase and n8n. Throughout this series you will learn how these two platforms do a lot of the heavy lifting for us, helping us create our agent in as little time as possible without compromising things like security. Let’s get started!

Like most dev pipelines, we’re going to start by developing locally before deploying, in the last post in this series we will cover the steps to deploy your application.

Database Design

First of all I want us to think about the design of our database. A little time spent here will save us lots of time later on. I like to use Mermaid Diagrams for planning my database design. Mermaid uses markdown definitions to create diagrams which can then be downloaded to your local machine and checked into source control.

Here you can see my Mermaid Diagram for our takeout restaurant. This is a simplified e-commerce model, we have five tables for storing details about customers, their basket, order, order items and products. The customer table has a foreign key on the primary key, this is because the unique id for the customer will also refer to the user id in Supabase, more about this later. You will also notice we have a basket table. This acts as a temporary holding area, making it easier for the agent to manage items without having to navigate multiple tables, you will learn more about this in part two.

Initialise Supabase

The first thing we need to do is initialise our Supabase project. If you don’t have Supabase and Docker installed locally go ahead and do that first, instructions are here.

Once installed use these commands to initialise and start your project

$ cd ~
$ mkdir takeout
$ cd takeout
$ supabase init
$ supabase start

Now we have Supabase running locally we can start to create our database.

Create database schema

The nice thing about using Mermaid diagrams is we can sync them with Visual Studio Code using the Mermaid Extension.

Install the Extension, log in to your Mermaid account then select which diagram to use. This will create a local version of your diagram which we can use to create our schema in Supabase.

You can use my Entity Relationship Diagram here.

Here you can see we now have the ERD saved locally, and any changes we make will be sync’d with the version in the cloud.

This is where it gets interesting, we could generate Supabase migrations manually by entering the relevant SQL statements to create each individual table but instead, we’re going to save some time and use Claude AI to do this for us.

To do this you will need to sign up to Claude and install the Visual Studio Code Extension.

Once you have completed these steps open up Claude in Visual Studio, log in and use the following command to initialise Claude for our project:

/init

This will create a CLAUDE.md file for us, this is an important file as it provides persistent instructions for Claude. In our case it tells Claude that this is a Supabase project, adding necessary context. Next we should tell Claude to enable Plan Mode. This means it won’t actually make any file changes, it will just show us the plan. This is important, because LLMs can hallucinate so we want to review the proposal before making any changes, especially when we’re asking a LLM to write row level security policies for us.

/plan

So now we can ask Claude to generate our database migrations for us by using this prompt:

> using @file:[YOUR ERD].mmd generate Supabase migrations for each entity.  The customer entity has a primary key customer_id that is also a foreign key that references Supabase auth.users(id).  Generate row level security rules as follows: product is public read. customer can be read, created and updated  by authenticated user. basket can be read, created, updated and deleted by authenticated user. order can be read, created and updated by authenticated user, order_line_item can be read, created and updated by authenticated user.

There is a very important reason why we ask Claude to plan our migrations first. In our prompt you can see we’re asking Claude to write row level security policies for us. We all know LLMs are prone to errors and hallucinations and there’s a real risk we could introduce a silent but dangerous vulnerability into our application! This way we act as the human in the middle, we check the code before it gets executed and therefore, we have an opportunity to catch errors and stop them making their way into our code.

After checking the plan, once you’re happy with the output you can tell Claude to proceed and generate the migrations for you. Next you need to run those migrations, use this command:

supabase db reset

Now if you navigate to http://localhost:54323/ and click Database you should see something like this:

So now we have our database schema set up, but we have no data in the Products table, let’s sort that out by creating a seed. As before we will use Claude to do this for us:

> In this project there is a table called products, seed this table with typical menu items from an indian takeout.

Like before use this command to apply our changes to Supabase.

supabase db reset

Now we have our database populated with some products, but we have much more than that, Supabase also gives us an entire application backend. In the next post we will be using Supabase REST API and authentication all of which are provided for us already, pretty neat right?

In the next post I will show you how to create the agent using n8n, connect it to our Supabase database and embed it in a website.

If you want to check out the code from this post you can find it here: https://github.com/steamhammercouk/takeout