Connect to Airtable

You can connect to Airtable using Retool's REST API integration and make it available as a resource. Once complete, you can write queries to interact with the Airtable API.

Requirements

All users for Retool organizations on Free or Team plans have global Edit permissions and can add, edit, and remove resources. If your organization manages user permissions for resources, you must be a member of a group with Edit all permissions.

To create your Airtable resource, you need:

• REST API connection details.
• A valid API key.

Airtable uses Bearer (token) authentication. You must provide an API key or access token for Retool to authorize requests. Refer to the Airtable documentation on authenticating requests to learn how to obtain an API key or access token.

If Airtable is behind a firewall, you must also allow access from Retool's IP addresses. Add these IP addresses to your firewall's allowlist before you create the resource.

1. Create a REST API resource

Retool can connect to almost any API or database, and has built-in integrations for popular data sources. Sign in to your Retool organization and create a new REST API resource from the Resources tab.

2. Configure the resource

Provide the necessary details to configure the resource so Retool can connect to Airtable. Not all settings are required but refer to the Airtable documentation to learn what is needed.

General

These settings configure the name and location of the resource within Retool.

Name

The name to use for the resource (e.g., Airtable).

Folder

The folder in which to save the resource.

Description

A brief description of the resource (e.g., Customer data).

Credentials

These settings configure how Retool connects to Airtable.

Base URL

The base URL for the Airtable API. This must be an absolute URL. Use https://api.airtable.com/v0/.

URL parameters

Key-value pairs to include as URL parameters with Airtable API requests. No additional URL parameters are required.

Headers

Key-value pairs to include as headers with Airtable API requests. Airtable uses Bearer (token) authentication which includes your API key or token as a header value. Include the following key-value pairs:

Key	Value
Authorization	Bearer access_token

Body

Key-value pairs to include in the body of Airtable API requests. No additional body values are required.

Cookies

Cookies to include with Airtable API requests. No cookies are required.

Authentication

The method of authentication to use with Airtable. Select None. Airtable authenticates requests using the API key or token you specified as a header value.

Forward all cookies

Whether to forward all cookies. This is useful if you have dynamic cookie names.

3. Save the resource

Click Create resource to complete the setup. You can then click either Create an app to immediately start building a Retool app or Back to resources to return to the list of resources.

Wrap up

Your Airtable resource is now ready to use. You write queries to make API requests by specifying the request method and endpoint, additional parameters to include, and the request body.

To verify you can successfully interact with Airtable, write a test query to retrieve some data. The following example retrieves a list of bases accessible by your API key..

Request

GET https://api.airtable.com/v0//meta/bases

Response

[
  {
    "bases": [
      {
        "id": "appLkNDICXNqxSDhG",
        "name": "Apartment Hunting",
        "permissionLevel": "create"
      },
      {
        "id": "appSW9R5uCNmRmfl6",
        "name": "Project Tracker",
        "permissionLevel": "edit"
      }
    ],
    "offset": "itr23sEjsdfEr3282/appSW9R5uCNmRmfl6"
  }
]