The Supabase RLS gotcha nobody warns you about: infinite recursion in multi-tenant policies

You're building teams/workspaces on Supabase. A row belongs to a workspace, and a user can touch it if they're a member. Simple enough — until your policies start throwing infinite recursion and you have no idea why. Here's the trap and the pattern that avoids it. The setup A membership table, with RLS on it too (of course): create table workspace_members ( workspace_id uuid references workspaces , user_id uuid references auth . users , primary key ( workspace_id , user_id ) ); alter table workspace_members enable row level security ; create policy "read own memberships" on workspace_members for select using ( user_id = ( select auth . uid ())); The trap Now you scope a tenant table by asking "which workspaces is this user in?" — by querying workspace_members inside the policy : -- ⚠️ this can recurse create policy "members read projects" on projects for select using ( workspace_id in ( select workspace_id from workspace_members where user_id = ( select auth . uid ()) ) ); The policy on projects queries workspace_members , which has its own RLS policy, which re-evaluates… you've built a loop. The fix: a security-definer function Resolve membership with a function that runs with the definer's rights, so reading workspace_members doesn't re-trigger RLS. The policy becomes a plain IN check — no recursion: create or replace function public . user_workspace_ids () returns setof uuid language sql security definer set search_path = '' -- pin it: this is the safety bit as $$ select workspace_id from public . workspace_members where user_id = auth . uid (); $$ ; create policy "members read projects" on projects for select using ( workspace_id in ( select public . user_workspace_ids ()) ); Why it's safe: the function is read-only, returns only the caller's own workspace ids, and search_path = '' prevents search-path hijacking (the classic SECURITY DEFINER footgun). It never exposes another user's memberships. Do this for every tenant table (reads and writes — remember WITH CH