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Airtable

Airtable is a spreadsheet-database hybrid. Note that because Val Town uses Deno, we use an unofficial library to access Airtable.

Setup

On the homepage, click Start from scratch to create a base:

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If prompted with automatic setup, click Skip. You should get a new base with a blank table.

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Adjust the table fields as you want (note that this isn’t covered by this guide).

Click on your profile icon, then on Developer hub:

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Click Create new token.

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Fill out the fields:

  • Name: Any. For example, valtown.
  • Scopes: You’ll most likely want to add data.records:read and data.records:write.
  • Access: Add the base you created earlier.

Lastly, click Create token. Here’s an example of how your settings could probably look like:

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Copy your token and click Done.

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Go to val.town, click on your username and then on Env Variables:

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Click New env variable. Set the key to a name you want to use to reference the token (for example, airtable_pat) and paste the copied personal access token into the value, then click Add.

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You can then use Airtable from val.town like so:

Example
import { Airtable } from "https://deno.land/x/airtable@v1.1.1/mod.ts";
const airtable = new Airtable({
apiKey: Deno.env.get("airtable_pat"),
baseId: "appXSrKDlwbAijRmD",
tableName: "All content",
});
// Sample data from: https://blog.airtable.com/database-vs-spreadsheet/
const results = await airtable.select();
console.log(results);

Make sure to change:

  • apiKey if you have used a different name for your environment variable.
  • baseId to the ID of your base. You can find it in the URL bar while a table is open and it will likely start with app:

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  • tableName to either the name of your table or the table ID which can also be found in the URL after the base ID (see above).