[HN Gopher] Show HN: NocoDB - The Open Source Airtable Alternative
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Show HN: NocoDB - The Open Source Airtable Alternative
Author : nocodb
Score : 284 points
Date : 2021-05-27 14:47 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| haolez wrote:
| Do you happen to have documentation somewhere? I want to
| understand the option for managing users in the platform (e.g. is
| Azure AD SSO supported?).
| nocodb wrote:
| Adding SSO/SAML would be in our enterprise edition. There isn't
| a plugin for it the current product for it :)
|
| Most of spreadsheet part is self explaining : here are all our
| demos https://nocodb.com/demos
|
| S3 and Google Auth for newbies can be found here :
| https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/master/markdown/plugin...
|
| Having said that, we will be working on the documentation
| series in coming week.
| haolez wrote:
| I wouldn't include that in enterprise, since you are creating
| difficulties for small companies to onboard with you. There
| are some companies that include SSO in the initial plans,
| like Zendesk, and they get us to happily pay for the plans
| that fit our scale. I'm pretty sure you will have other
| awesome features to include in the enterprise plan.
|
| Please, reconsider and good luck! :)
| cfitprasad wrote:
| This is cool. Looking forward to playing with our PostgreSQL and
| MariaDB instances.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| Great news. I don't know if anyone remembers this, but there used
| to be a program called Ecco Pro that Airtable really reminded me
| of. I haven't run Ecco in probably 20 years to more so I could be
| entirely off the mark, but the "freeform spreadsheet" seems
| really similar.
| nocodb wrote:
| Thanks for sharing about Ecco Pro .. just looked it up :
| http://jkontherun.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/ecco_calend...
|
| Was aware of DabbleDB :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY
| wolpoli wrote:
| There is also a similar program called InfoQube, which is the
| work of a single individual: https://www.infoqube.biz/
| honkycat wrote:
| Why didn't I think of this. Looks awesome!
| nocodb wrote:
| Please give it a try & join our discord community
| https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW
| louisvgchi wrote:
| How do you plan to make money and sustain vitality from this open
| source offering?
|
| Open source has a lot of overhead, and if you offer "enterprise"
| versions, others will compete with you, or worse, Amazon may
| offer your service for free as a bundle.
|
| I'm interested in hearing your plan.
| ggregoire wrote:
| Kinda off topic but I'm curious, what's the proper strategy to
| adopt as a company when someone copies your product and
| distribute it legally for free? Do nothing (individuals & small
| companies that are going to self host the product were never your
| market anyway)? Offer a self-hosted plan too? Obviously it
| depends for each company. I wonder if there are companies who
| famously changed their offer following the release of a
| free/self-hosted/open-source competing product.
| forgotmysn wrote:
| as crazy as it sounds, there are many large, enterprise clients
| that have to pay for vendors, they literally are not structured
| to implement free/O.S. software. i imagine that those large
| orgs are much more significant contributors to a software
| company's revenue than the small start-ups that might be more
| able to implement an O.S. alternative.
| kkirsche wrote:
| It's also often used to mitigate risk as you have a vendor to
| call and offload work, costs, specialization, and other
| factors to during critical incidents.
| forgotmysn wrote:
| not to mention custom feature requests
| schemescape wrote:
| FYI: On Safari, the main web site (nocodb.com) content bounces up
| and down, apparently because of the bouncing logos near the top
| of the page.
| nocodb wrote:
| Thank you for mentioning, what is the safari version ? looks
| good at 11.1.2
| abdusco wrote:
| Looks great! Can I extend it? Does it have plugin/hook etc.
| support?
|
| I've just tried it with an SQLite database. It doesn't seem to
| support `BLOB` columns (that's reasonable). I would have liked to
| be able to display images in BLOB columns as virtual attachments
| or show a download link.
|
| Edit: It actually does!
|
| https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/master/packages/nc-plu...
|
| But there doesn't seem to be any documentation for it yet.
| nocodb wrote:
| Yes we have hooks for spreadsheet inserts/updates/deletes and
| we will be working on the frontend part to make it modularised
| as mentioned in another comment.
|
| https://youtu.be/H4qBE0T47b4
|
| Store images in BLOBs - we aren't against it. But we ran short
| of time to make that work for all databases.
|
| For file storage : it used local filesystem if no storage app
| is installed.
|
| You can connect to wide variety of storage services : S3,
| Minio, BackBlaze, GCS, Azure to name a few. I believe Azure
| storage isn't tested as we didn't have credits with them :)
| xemoka wrote:
| This looks a lot like baserow.io too; nice to see more projects
| like this opening up spreadsheet/db alternatives.
| nocodb wrote:
| Although there is similarity, we are radically different.
|
| We transform any existing databases MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server
| & SQLite databases into a spreadsheet. This is a _massive_
| difference to begin with. And the ability to invite team to
| collaborate and build business workflow automations with Slack,
| Twilio is available for everybody. Since the launch today, I
| have already have close to 25+ plugin requests which sounds
| reasonable for NocoDB to have! We believe for a horizontal
| product like NocoDB - developing every app, connector and
| plugins is just beyond the ability of single team in open
| source. It is community driven approach that eases this
| possibility.
| Artistry121 wrote:
| Yes! Exactly this. This builds an incredible toolkit that
| really brings the bicycle of the 21st century into view.
| vidar wrote:
| What would you say is the current upper bound on the number
| of records in a table that you support ?
| nocodb wrote:
| There is no limit on upperbound - spreadsheet fetches data
| from your table in database.
| 1337shadow wrote:
| Does it updates them in the database?
| nocodb wrote:
| Yes it does which is what it makes it interesting.
| getwhatelse wrote:
| Good to see this. Quickest way to build admin apps!
| nocodb wrote:
| Yes, I believe NocoDB can be used as admin apps in most
| backends.
|
| We've audit mechanism to track every single action from all our
| users. And the access control is really fine grained till
| column level.
| fcsp wrote:
| Am I missing something or does this really contain zero tests of
| any kind? I found some empty cypress boilerplate and
| https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/packages/nc-lib...
| nocodb wrote:
| Tests are here :
| https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/.github/workflo...
|
| https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/runs/2687614633?check_suite...
| fcsp wrote:
| This is the ci jobs that run ci suites, but the GitHub
| workflow you linked has a ton of stuff commented and also
| yeah you can run a test suite in CI but if it contains no
| tests what use is it?
| nocodb wrote:
| After 'Cypress' run there is 'Docker' run.
|
| And our tests are dockerised so that it could be run
| locally with minimal setup and on CI too.
|
| Please click on 'Docker' then 'Test MySQL REST APIs' &
| 'Test GraphQL APIs'.
| fcsp wrote:
| Could you please post a link to the actual tests being
| run? GitHub workflows don't give me access to the test
| logs for the workflow you linked, and judging by test
| runtime of 1:30 and following the trail of commands it
| seems this is just spent downloading docker images to run
| an empty cypress boilerplate?
| nocodb wrote:
| Ah, I never imagined those logs are not public! We just
| moved from travis to actions. This is new to us.
|
| Below is the command to run the test for REST APIs
|
| https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/.github/work
| flo...
|
| git clone https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb
|
| and you can run the same command.
| fcsp wrote:
| But there are no tests behind this command?
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is AGPL-3.0! Thanks for licensing it this way. It's a bit
| late here, but I'll try this tomorrow!
| nocodb wrote:
| Hey Everybody,
|
| We are really excited to open source NocoDB today.
|
| NocoDB is an open source Airtable alternative.
|
| Github : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb
|
| NocoDB works by connecting to any relational database and
| transforming them into a smart spreadsheet interface!
|
| NocoDB currently works with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL
| Server, SQLite, Amazon Aurora & MariaDB databases.
|
| This allows you to build no-code business solutions
| collaboratively with teams.
|
| Getting started is simple : docker run -p
| 8080:8080 nocodb/nocodb or npx create-nocodb-app
|
| Also NocoDB's app store allows you to build business workflows on
| views with combination of Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord,
| Twilio, Whatsapp, Email & any 3rd party APIs too. Plus NocoDB
| provides programmatic access to APIs so that you can build
| integrations with Zapier / Integromat and custom applications
| too.
|
| For storage you can connect to S3, Mini, GCS, Azure, DigitalOcean
| spaces & any S3 compatible API
|
| NocoDB gives programmatic access to REST & GraphQL APIs. And with
| our API tokens it can be easily integrated with Zapier /
| Integromat.
|
| - - - - - -
|
| Also please join our community at :
|
| - Github : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb
|
| - Discord : https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW
|
| - Twitter : https://twitter.com/nocodb
|
| Would love to hear usecases & feedback.
|
| Thank you,
|
| Team NocoDB
|
| edit : made the comment short :)
| jasonblais wrote:
| This is an exciting release! Look forward to seeing how this
| project takes off.
| nocodb wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| Getting started is really simple - please check below.
| docker run -p 8080:8080 nocodb/nocodb or npx
| create-nocodb-app
| Artistry121 wrote:
| WOW! I am so excited by this. I'm going to build some nice CRMs
| and project management tools for my clients - small and growing
| service businesses - and attempt a cool integration with
| graphing and Matrix.
|
| This is so important and the opening up of code / databases to
| non-technical people will create so much value.
|
| Maybe we can work together on it! (I guess, open source means
| we will be)
| de6u99er wrote:
| Looks good in the Github Readme file, but having tested the
| docker-compose/pg setup via docker-compose I think you still
| have some work to do. A lot of things result in an error, or
| are not possible yet.
|
| E.g. I tried a simple example with A country table containing
| an iso-code and a name, and a company table containing a name
| and a country. Somehow I can not use the iso code in the
| company table, I am forced to use the auto-incrementing primary
| key. I am not able to set iso-code column as unique which would
| solve my issue.
|
| The app has also UI problems. E.g. when adding a new row, one
| the last field edited seems to be still in editing mode since
| the value is left-bound and not centered like the other values.
| Only after entering another field the value seems to be
| recognized as changed and I can save the data.
|
| Clicking on "Swagger apis dock" results in following error
| message "Cannot GET /nc/testproject_rest_api_HZOx/v1/graphql".
|
| Having added a few images via attachment column, I noticed that
| I can access those from a incognito window where I am
| definitely not logged in.
|
| Steps to reproduce:
|
| 1. connect to database container -> docker-compose exec --user
| postgres xcdb psql
|
| 2. connect to database -> \c xcdb
|
| 3. list tables -> \d
|
| 4. select data from the table with attachments (in my case the
| company table) -> select * from xa1__company;
|
| 5. copy one of the urls and paste it in an incognito tab
|
| ---------------------------------
|
| Another issue that I see is that it relies a lot on external
| libraries, of which this one has been blocked by my ad-blocker
| --> https://static.hotjar.com/c/hotjar-2297736.js?sv=6
|
| Hotjar seems to be a tool tracking the user interactions with
| the product -> https://www.hotjar.com/
|
| This is where I stopped evaluating your product LOL
| nocodb wrote:
| Thanks for your report.
|
| With regards to Swagger thing, we allow to create multiple
| projects within same schema too! And this happens in NC_DB
| only - I imagine we 've an issue with Swagger related model
| creation. This should be straight forward.
|
| At row edit part - we will work on your feedback.
| de6u99er wrote:
| What about the hotjar part and external JS libraries? (I
| might have edited my previous comment in the meanwhile and
| you might not have seen it)
| _jal wrote:
| Cool, I will be playing with this tonight.
|
| I haven't built a webapp in several years, and was just trying
| to find a way to offer access to a DB for a non-technical
| person. After seeing my options for UI were (still!) basically
| Access and go-build-something, was resigned to losing my
| weekend to coming back up to speed with Django, but it looks
| like this should be fine.
| nocodb wrote:
| >> Was just trying to find a way to offer access to a DB for
| a non-technical person
|
| Yes, you can say we are advanced version of MS Access for all
| databases that can talk to even 3rd party apps.
| davnicwil wrote:
| You should check out Stacker [0] and see if it works for your
| usecase - we let you build apps without code using Airtable
| or Google Sheets as a backend. Might be what you need if time
| is of the essence and you don't want to worry about hosting
| either. I work at Stacker, my email's in my profile if you
| have any questions.
|
| [0] https://stackerhq.com
| yarapavan wrote:
| Congratulations! Exciting to see nocodb adding to the low-
| code/no-code scene today. Best wishes to you and your team.
|
| 1. What is your monetization strategy? 2. Why AGPL? 3. Is there
| a tutorial or documentation on creating additional
| integrations?
| nocodb wrote:
| Thank you so much.
|
| Monetization we'll figure it out whilst interacting with our
| community. AGPL : we don't want to be sorry with likes of AWS
| etc around :) This wouldn't stop you from using it freely or
| commercially.
|
| We would be rolling out the tutorial for adding integrations.
| scotu wrote:
| Happy to see you try AGPL honestly. It might turn out to
| not be the right choice, but I think as a license it didn't
| get a fair test because of how businesses avoiding viral
| licenses made software authors shy away from them. With the
| AWS situation I really wish to see more use, and if it can
| be successful.
| steveharman wrote:
| Please forgive the total-noob question but once I've hooked up
| to say a mySQL db - can I write _to_ the db as well as read
| _from_ it?
|
| Thanks
| nocodb wrote:
| Yes, its just like your google spreadsheets. You can
| insert/edit/delete. And share views with and without
| password.
| steveharman wrote:
| Fantastic, thanks!
| drannex wrote:
| This looks absolutely fantastic!
|
| Is there any chance to build in SQL (specifically, Postgres)
| commands similar to how Supabase does into the UI? (I should also
| mention, this looks perhaps even better than Supabase and easier
| to get up and running on your own system!). The built in REST and
| GraphQL API points are beautiful.
|
| Looking forward to using this!
| nocodb wrote:
| Thank you for the kind feedback.
|
| >> Is there any chance to build in SQL commands.
|
| We've full fledged SQL Editor support in the product. Also
| support for SQL views, procedures etc. It is not shown in UI as
| there is lot to take in. So it will be in shortly :)
|
| NocoDB can be run as a single node.js file which has just SIX
| lines of code in it.
|
| So entire NocoDB stack can be run a repl.it / glitch too! :) -
| This makes it insanely powerful & ubiquitous.
|
| https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb-seed/blob/main/index.js
| antman wrote:
| This looks more featured than Seatable I was looking into. A few
| questions on features and plans:
|
| 1. Are all the views mobile friendly,
|
| 2. Any plan for a map view,
|
| 3. Multiple views in a page? (aka dashboard)
|
| 4. How does AGPL affect getting payed to create a solution based
| on this? I'm not talking about offering it as a service as is as
| happens with elastic, redis and the cloud providers.
|
| 5. How do we create plugins?
| nocodb wrote:
| Thank you. Have created the issues as below.
|
| 1. #158
|
| 2. #159
|
| 3. #160
|
| 4. AGPL doesn't stop you getting payed for creating your own
| solution based out of this. The preferred way to run it is as
| docker. And if there are changes in NocoDB code, it needs to be
| shared back with community. Otherwise, it is absolutely fine to
| use it.
|
| 5. Plugin/apps is at the heart of NocoDB. Whilst backend part
| of plugin is modularised, frontend has to be done. And we are
| using NuxtJs which happened to be an excellent choice for this.
| The documentation will follow soon.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| You should also check out BaseRow if this interests you... i'm
| not affiliated, just a fan
|
| https://baserow.io/
| sdfhbdf wrote:
| Interested that the project started as a REST API generator for
| any MySQL database [1], and then in a year was transformed to
| what can be seen today from what I gather following the git log.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/0.4.9
| nocodb wrote:
| Yes, Xmysql was a hobby project originally submitted on HN.
| Below is the gist of it.
|
| We open sourced two API solutions before NocoDB : - A no-code
| REST APIs generator for any MySQL DB. ~200,000 Docker pulls.
| This was a hobby project & had no GUI. - A low-code REST-
| GraphQL APIs generator for any database with GUI. Used by 100s
| of companies. Including fortune 500s & publicly trading
| companies.
|
| The thing that surprised us the most was that even non-
| developers started using our API products & rooting for us.
| Whilst everybody loved instant API access to databases, it was
| slow-and-painful for them to build UI and collaborate with
| their teams. This made us to radically recombine the power of
| our 2 API products then transform them into something better.
| tegansnyder wrote:
| Is anyone aware of something similar that supports Redshift? I
| have some colleagues that would benefit from a UI on top of a few
| Redshift tables to manage data (edit/import/delete).
| nocodb wrote:
| What tools have your tried with redshift ? which has helped.
|
| Does a spreadsheet like thing help for columnar database ?
| Please let us know usecases.
| tegansnyder wrote:
| We haven't tried anything yet. I'm about to get some users
| setup with ODBC access in Excel to make some manual data
| edits. Essentially we have some core data and some metadata
| that is managed manually and I'm looking for a light weight
| UI that these users can use to manage the metadata tables in
| Redshift.
| dadrian wrote:
| Is Airtable being closed-source a problem anyone has ever had?
|
| "I was going to use this hosted, no-code spreadsheet/database
| platform, but then I realized it's closed source!" is not
| something anyone who ever would have paid for Airtable has ever
| said.
| krrrh wrote:
| I guess this can be implemented as an admin layer on your own
| application, and also handle sensitive data that may not be
| copied to a third party for various reasons including
| regulatory.
|
| I've used a lot of pluggable admin interfaces for opening up
| tables to interrogation and manipulation by non tech people,
| and this seems better than those, and airtable was usually
| never on the table.
| nocodb wrote:
| Fair enough, having it as open source and work with existing
| databases opens up entirely new usecase & opportunities.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I want to run this on a raspberry pi/desktop computer and have
| access to all the features i want for free, and you don't get
| that with Airtable - but you do foor a FOSS solution. Hobby
| users like me probably don't want lots of SaaS platforms when
| they can self host. Airtable is _the_ SaaS i like the most, and
| desperately wanted it to self host.
|
| Also, while the data isn't critical for me, a self-hosted
| solution ensures the data is private.
| maddyboo wrote:
| It seems like it would make sense for teams that would prefer
| an on-prem or privately hosted solution without paying
| enterprise rates. It's also probably cheaper for teams in
| general depending on how much work it takes to install and
| administer.
|
| According to their support site, Airtable doesn't even support
| on-prem. [0]
|
| [0]: https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/202576389-Can...
| fragileone wrote:
| Well it was the case for me, I'm tired of getting locked into
| proprietary systems so a FOSS alternative is perfect.
| philsnow wrote:
| This is great, I've been getting into using airtable / coda for
| some house management stuff, but I've not liked that it's in the
| cloud (because I want to be more sure that I can look back 5
| years and still see it).
|
| I love the audit table, that's a nice touch.
| nocodb wrote:
| :)
| lardissone wrote:
| Awesome. Tried it and it's so beautiful!
|
| Would it be possible to use planetscale as db?
| nocodb wrote:
| >> Tried it and it's so beautiful!
|
| Thank you it means so much.
|
| Yes, in our earlier version we could connect to Planetscale and
| create tables (this was at inception stage). With recent
| Planetscale release DDL are no longer supported and branching
| is the way. We would love to support if anything changes.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Anybody have a a good recommendation how to self deploy that's
| internet accessible? I'm worried messing something up and
| exposing my network. Or deploying on the cloud be better?
| nocodb wrote:
| This is our 1-Click/1-Command shell script on fresh ubuntu
| machine.
|
| But we havent tested it recently. It installs docker, mysql,
| letsencrypt etc and help you set. You can try it.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Looks good - for monetization you should make the integrations
| paid and the core thing free.
| Artistry121 wrote:
| Or build consulting, management and integration partners.
| Strategic use of tools / trainings, etc. are really important.
| See how Oracle grows with consulting teams.
| nocodb wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. Much like Wordpress plugins ?
| gwbrooks wrote:
| Speaking of Wordpress: This would be an amazing tool for
| someone managing a lot of Wordpress sites -- I can picture it
| allowing for global changes across multiple sites, bulk
| content uploads, etc.
|
| Almost certainly not your primary use case, but probably a
| quick way to gain market penetration if you or someone in the
| community built an integration for that purpose.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I was just thinking/hoping that it would connect with
| Wordpress DBs. I use an app to do it now (WP Sheet Editor)
| and yet imagine NocoDB could be much more powerful.
|
| Any ideas about if it would be possible to connect it and
| if so, how?
| handoyosutanto wrote:
| This is such an excellent release! I am already thinking of a
| many of use cases for our own org by combining this with Next.JS
| and build a self-hosted no-code API powered, headless CMS!
| nocodb wrote:
| Totally, makes sense.
|
| NocoDB can be run as a single node.js file and it is just SIX
| lines of code.
|
| https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb-seed/blob/main/index.js
|
| Just mount nocodb into your express.js and it's done.
| agustif wrote:
| Could you elaborate more on this? wouldn't require docker if
| hooking up the middleware into express?
|
| Would this work for a blitzjs/nextjs app?
|
| thx! really cool stuff
| nocodb wrote:
| Wouldn't require docker if hooking up the middleware into
| express?
|
| Yes, absolutely.
|
| We worked really hard to make it minimal :)
|
| Please give it a quick try with below npx
| create-nocodb-app
| agustif wrote:
| edit: didn't work for me with npm, must be my local env.
|
| did work with yarn tho yarn create nocodb-app
|
| will look it up
| nocodb wrote:
| ah ok.
|
| Was this on windows ? You might have to start command
| prompt with administrator privileges. Some of our users
| ran into these.
| seymores wrote:
| Cool! How to integrate with Okta?
| nocodb wrote:
| SSO / SAML will be be in enterprise versions.
| noconoco wrote:
| Given that the project is AGPL without any CLA, how do you
| plan on doing that, if you don't mind me asking? Some sort of
| portal in front that does this on your behalf?
|
| Asking since I've considered AGPL for my own projects and
| wanted to monetize via making SAML/SSO "premium" and found
| that I could not do this easily without CLA
| owlbynight wrote:
| This looks amazing, thank you.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Can this pull from home assistant out of interest? Sqllite of
| influxdb ?
| nocodb wrote:
| >> home assistant out of interest? Sqllite of influxdb ?
|
| Sorry could you help elaborate on this.
|
| You want to access home assistant data which is in sqlite or
| something.
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(page generated 2021-05-27 23:00 UTC)