Trialing Retool locally

If you're like us, you probably have a lot of data that is only accessible from your private network. That's why we built the on-prem version of Retool. This 5 minute guide will help you set up a trial of on-premise Retool locally or on a cloud service.

Running Retool locally on Mac or Linux

Running the easy install script

Run this script to create Retool at ~/retool/retool-onpremise and run the docker containers

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tryretool/retool-onpremise/master/local-trial)"

Retool will now be running at localhost:3000. You can open this page in your browser then click sign up.

Installing Retool without the script

Prefer to install manually rather using the script? That's cool too. Just follow the steps below:

Run git clone https://github.com/tryretool/retool-onpremise.git to clone our repository
Run the local-trial script by giving the path to it ./retool-onpremise/local-trial

That's it! You're done.

Explaining the script

The script you ran did three main things:

Downloaded the latest version of Retool and installed it in ~/Retool
Configured the docker.env file with the correct environment variables
Ran the Retool docker containers

To stop running Retool, you can end the process by running stop-local-trial, which is inside ~/retool/retool-onpremise by default.

Connecting to a resource (database or API)

A resource is a datasource that you can read into your Retool application and use while building an app.

If your machine is on your company's VPN, you should be able to add your internal resources.

If you want to add a database that you have running locally, make sure to use host.docker.internal as the host in the resource configuration screen to tell Retool to look outside of the Docker container that it is running in.

Next steps

That's it! Have fun, build a few apps, and reach out if you'd like help with a more permanent deployment!

Running Retool in a cloud service

To run trial Retool on a cloud service like AWS, Azure, or Heroku you can just run the easy install script on the machine. If you need help creating a machine with the right resources to run Retool, You can follow these instructions to create the right kind of machine.

Troubleshooting and FAQs

Retool has support accessible through the Intercom bubble on this page! You can contact us if the FAQs below don't answer your question.

Retool failed to start when I ran the script and I'm not sure why

There are a few common reasons Retool fails:

You don't have docker or docker-compose installed correctly.
You are on Linux to add sudo when running docker-compose up
You need to add the license key LOCAL-ONLY-TRIAL to the docker.env file

I keep getting redirected to the homepage after logging in or signing up

Make sure COOKIE_INSECURE=true is set in the docker.env file