gatsby-source-airtable
Gatsby source plugin for sourcing data into your Gatsby application from your Airtable base tables
Install
# using npm
npm install --save gatsby-source-airtable
# using yarn
yarn add gatsby-source-airtableExample
Getting data from two different tables:
// In gatsby-config.js
plugins: [
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-airtable`,
options: {
apiKey: `YOUR_AIRTABLE_KEY`, // may instead specify via env, see below
concurrency: 5, // default, see using markdown and attachments for more information
tables: [
{
baseId: `YOUR_AIRTABLE_BASE_ID`,
tableName: `YOUR_TABLE_NAME`,
tableView: `YOUR_TABLE_VIEW_NAME`, // optional
queryName: `OPTIONAL_NAME_TO_IDENTIFY_TABLE`, // optionally default is false - makes all records in this table a separate node type, based on your tableView, or if not present, tableName, e.g. a table called "Fruit" would become "allAirtableFruit". Useful when pulling many airtables with similar structures or fields that have different types. See https://github.com/jbolda/gatsby-source-airtable/pull/52.
mapping: { `CASE_SENSITIVE_COLUMN_NAME`: `VALUE_FORMAT` }, // optional, e.g. "text/markdown", "fileNode"
tableLinks: [`CASE`, `SENSITIVE`, `COLUMN`, `NAMES`], // optional, for deep linking to records across tables.
separateNodeType: false, // boolean, default is false, see the documentation on naming conflicts for more information
separateMapType: false, // boolean, default is false, see the documentation on using markdown and attachments for more information
},
{
baseId: `YOUR_AIRTABLE_BASE_ID`,
tableName: `YOUR_TABLE_NAME`,
tableView: `YOUR_TABLE_VIEW_NAME` // optional
// can leave off queryName, mapping or tableLinks if not needed
}
]
}
}
];Get one single record (table row), where Field_1 === YOUR_VALUE:
{
airtable(table: { eq: "YOUR_TABLE_NAME" }, data: { Field_1: { eq: "YOUR_VALUE" } }) {
data {
Field_1
Field_2
Linked_Field {
data {
Linked_Field_1
}
}
}
}
}Get all records from YOUR_TABLE_NAME where Field_1 === YOUR_VALUE:
{
allAirtable(
filter: { table: { eq: "YOUR_TABLE_NAME" }, data: { Field_1: { eq: "YOUR_VALUE" } } }
) {
edges {
node {
data {
Field_1
}
}
}
}
}Get all records ordered according selected tableView:
{
allAirtable(sort: { fields: rowIndex }) {
edges {
node {
data {
Field_1
}
}
}
}
}How it works
When running gatsby develop or gatsby build, this plugin will fetch all data
for all rows in each of the tables you specify, making them available for query
throughout your Gatsby app, and to other Gatsby plugins as well.
As seen in the example above, tables is always specified as an array of table
objects. These tables may be sourced from different bases.
Querying for airtable will always only return one record (defaulting to the
first record in the table), and querying for allAirtable will return any
records that match your query parameters.
As in the examples above, you can narrow your query by filtering for table names, and field values.
Deep linking across tables
One powerful feature of Airtable is the ability to specify fields which link to
records in other tables— the Link to a Record field type. If you wish to
query data from a linked record, you must specify the field name in tableLinks
(matching the name shown in Airtable, not the escaped version).
This will create nested nodes accessible in your GraphQL queries, as shown in
the above example. If you do not specify a linked field in tableLinks, you
will just receive the linked record’s Airtable IDs as strings. The name of the
column/field does not have to match the related table, but you do need to make
sure that the related table is included as an object in your gatsby-config.js
as well.
Using markdown and attachments
Optionally, you may provide a “mapping”. This will alert the plugin that column
names you specify are of a specific, non-string format of your choosing. This is
particularly useful if you would like to have Gatsby pick up the fields for
transforming, e.g. text/markdown. If you do not provide a mapping, Gatsby will
just “infer” what type of value it is, which is most typically a string.
For an example of a markdown-and-airtable-driven site using
gatsby-transformer-remark, see the examples folder in this repo.
If you are using the Attachment type field in Airtable, you may specify a
column name with fileNode and the plugin will bring in these files. Using this
method, it will create “nodes” for each of the files and expose this to all of
the transformer plugins. A good use case for this would be attaching images in
Airtable, and being able to make these available for use with the sharp
plugins and gatsby-image. Specifying a fileNode does require a peer
dependency of gatsby-source-filesystem otherwise it will fall back as a
non-mapped field. The locally available files and any ecosystem connections will
be available on the node as localFiles.
If you are specifying more than one type of mapping, you may potentially run
into issues with data types clashing and throwing errors. An additional option
that you may specify is separateMapType which will create a gatsby node type
for each type of data. This should prevent issues with your data types clashing.
When using the Attachment type field, this plugin governs requests to download
the associated files from Airtable to 5 concurrent requests to prevent excessive
requests on Airtable’s servers - which can result in refused/hanging
connections. You can adjust this limit with the concurrency option in your
gatsby-config.js file. Set the option with an integer value for your desired
limit on attempted concurrent requests. A value of 0 will allow requests to be
made without any limit.
The power of views
Within Airtable, every table can have one or more named Views. These Views are a convenient way to pre-filter and sort your data before querying it in Gatsby. If you do not specify a view in your table object, raw data will be returned in no particular order.
For example, if you are creating a blog or documentation site, specify a
published field in Airtable, create a filter showing only published posts, and
specify this as the (optional) tableView option in gatsby-config.js
Naming conflicts
You may have a situation where you are including two separate bases, each with a
table that has the exact same name. With the data structure of this repo, both
bases would fall into allAirtable and you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart
when building GraphQL queries. This is what the optional queryName setting is
for— simply to provide an alternate name for a table.
If you would like to have the query names for tables be different from the
default allAirtable or airtable, you may specify separateNodeType as
true.
Column Names
Within GraphQL (the language you query information from and that this plugin
puts nodes into), there are character limitations. Most specifically we cannot
have spaces in field names. We don’t want to force you to change your Airtable
names, so we will “clean” the keys and replace the spaces with an underscore
(e.g. The Column Name becomes The_Column_Name). We use the cleaned name
everywhere including gatsby-config.js and within your queries. We don’t warn
you when this happens to cut down on the verbosity of the output.
Known exception
Some column names might end up with more than two underscores in a sequence, for example,
Phone no. (Cell)
would become
Phone_no___Cell_
as the period, the space and the parenthesis all become underscores. Although your graphql queries will work, you will see only nulls in this column. So please ensure the names of your fields in Airtable do not result in 3 sequential underscores.
API Keys
Airtable has moved from using a single API key per user to using personal access tokens that carry specific privileges limited to specific bases and workspaces. The personal API keys will be deprecated by the end of January 2024. The personal access tokens can be used interchangeably with the older API keys.
To create a new token, go to the Personal Access Tokens panel of the Developer Hub. gatsby-source-airtable requires the data.records:read scope on any base(s) from which you’ll be pulling data. You’ll need the full Token shown to you only one time on creation, not the truncated Token ID shown in the table of all Personal Access Tokens. Once you have this token value, use it as the API key in the configuration outlined below.
The API key can be hard coded directly in gatsby-config.js as noted in the
previous section— this exposes your key to anyone viewing your repository and
is not recommended. You should inject your API key as recommended below to
prevent it from being committed to source control.
We recommended specifying your API key using an
Environment Variable.
You may also specify it in your command line such as
AIRTABLE_API_KEY=XXXXXX gatsby develop. Note: If you use an environment
variable prepended with GATSBY_, it takes advantage of some syntactic sugar
courtesy of Gatsby, which automatically makes it available - but any references
to environment variables like this that are rendered client-side will
automatically expose your API key within the browser. To avoid accidentally
exposing it, we recommend not prepending it with GATSBY_.
To be safe, you can also setup your API key via a config variable, apiKey
defined in gatsby-config.js. This is the recommended way to inject your API
key.
// In gatsby-config.js
plugins: [
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-airtable`,
options: {
// not prefaced with "GATSBY_", will not automatically be included client-side unless you explicitly expose it
apiKey: process.env.AIRTABLE_API_KEY,
// ...etc
},
},
];You can either use a node tool like “dotenv” to load secrets like your Airtable
API key from a .env file, or you can specify it in your command line such as
AIRTABLE_API_KEY=XXXXXX gatsby develop.
If you add or change your API key in an environment variable at the system level, you may need to reload your code editor/IDE for that variable to reload.
Columns without any values (yet)
If you want to perform conditional logic based on data that may or may not be
present in Airtable, but you do not yet have tabular data for the “may” case,
you can update the gatsby-source-airtable section of gatsby-config.js to
include sensible defaults for those fields so that they will be returned via
your GraphQL calls:
// In gatsby-config.js
plugins: [
{
resolve: `gatsby-source-airtable`,
options: {
apiKey: process.env.AIRTABLE_API_KEY,
tables: [
{
baseId: process.env.AIRTABLE_BASE,
tableName: process.env.AIRTABLE_TABLE_NAME,
defaultValues: {
// currently does not accept null / undefined. use empty string instead
// and perform your conditional logic on name_of_field.length > 0 ? condition_1 : condition_2
NAME_OF_FIELD_THAT_WILL_OTHERWISE_NOT_BE_RETURNED_IF_ALL_VALUES_ARE_BLANK: "",
// ... etc
},
},
],
},
},
];History
A Gatsby source plugin for pulling rows from multiple tables and bases in
Airtable. This was originally inspired by
kevzettler/gatsby-source-airtable
and eventually superseeded the original plugin with the introduction of Gatsby
v2.
If you are looking for the documentation on gatsby-source-airtable-linked, see
the additional branch. We do recommend moving your dependency over to this
plugin, gatsby-source-airtable, for Gatsby v2. (If you are still on Gatsby v1,
see
gatsby-source-airtable-linked
for compatible code.)
Contributors
Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):
This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!