13 ms·

Show HN: NocoDB – Open-Source Airtable Alternative

562 points by nocodb 5y ago

nocodb 5y ago
Hey Everybody, We are really excited to open source NocoDB today. NocoDB is an open source Airtable alternative. Github : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb 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 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb - Discord : https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW - Twitter : https://twitter.com/nocodb https://twitter.com/nocodb Would love to hear usecases & feedback. Thank you, Team NocoDB edit : made the comment short :)
- jasonblais 5y ago
  This is an exciting release! Look forward to seeing how this project takes off.
  - nocodb 5y ago
    Thank you. Getting started is really simple - please check below. docker run -p 8080:8080 nocodb/nocodb or npx create-nocodb-app
- yarapavan 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Yes, its just like your google spreadsheets. You can insert/edit/delete. And share views with and without password.
    - steveharman 5y ago
      Fantastic, thanks!
- _jal 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    >> 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 5y ago
    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 https://stackerhq.com
- Artistry121 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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 also has 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 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/ https://www.hotjar.com/ This is where I stopped evaluating your product LOL --------------------------------- Clicking on Calendar, Kanban, and Form results in a "Coming soon" message. Which is curious since, your website demonstrates it already. --------------------------------- Those rules saying delete cascade seem to be nonsense. I was able to delete rows in both tables (country, company) without any cascading happening which would result in an inconsistent state. --> Foreign keys seem only to exist within your applications metamodel and they don't seem to be respected accordingly. --------------------------------- My final verdict: You have a lot of work ahead of you if you want to bring this into a production ready state. Until then I recommend to others not using it with your production databases, and because of coming with the hotjar user action tracking tool not use and privacy related data with it.
  - 5y ago
- syrusakbary 5y ago
  This is awesome!! I'm also super excited about this. You should apply to YCombinator S21 batch! (feel free to use my reference: syrusakbary if you would like!) https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
- Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  I'm very excited, looking at the GitHub stars in just 24 hours after launch it looks like many others are. This looks like a text book example of successful 'Show HN' launch. So my question is really regarding this launch, rather than NocoDB itself as all pertinent questions regarding it seems to have been asked. I see you have got some feedback on your website regarding NocoDB after production deployment by some companies, How long you folks have been developing NocoDB? Were you using your personal funds for development? All the best, Hope NoCoDB turns out to be another successful dual-licensed startup.
- prox 5y ago
  Is there any way to turn this into a desktop app?
  - nocodb 5y ago
    In our 2nd iteration this was a desktop app that could connect to database, create-edit schema and generate code and was without spreadsheet.
- tecleandor 5y ago
  Hi! FYI, I think you are using the wrong logo on Vasyl Rakivnenko testimonial. You using the Spanish Servired (a bank network) logo instead of the Polish Servired (Road Transportation). I think this is the correct one: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servired-sp-z-o-o-/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/servired-sp-z-o-o-/
  - nocodb 5y ago
    Thanks a tonne, fixed it.
- towelpluswater 5y ago
  This is neat, nice work. Any plans to add Snowflake as a database?
  - seektable 5y ago
    Snowflake is a DW solution - in most cases it is populated from other OLTP DBs and uses as a data source for BI tools. What is the purpose of editing data directly in Snowflake?..
- croes 5y ago
  Can't seem to get it to run on Windows 10 via npx or git clone. Both ways show error 9009, failed at the sqlite3@5.0.0 install script.
handoyosutanto 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb-seed/blob/main/index.js Just mount nocodb into your express.js and it's done.
  - agustif 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        ah ok. Was this on windows ? You might have to start command prompt with administrator privileges. Some of our users ran into these.
drannex 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb-seed/blob/main/index.js
honkycat 5y ago
Why didn't I think of this. Looks awesome!
- nocodb 5y ago
  Please give it a try & join our discord community https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW
endisneigh 5y ago
Looks good - for monetization you should make the integrations paid and the core thing free.
- nocodb 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Much like Wordpress plugins ?
  - gwbrooks 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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?
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Charging for plugins might be tricky, given the AGPL licensing.
- Artistry121 5y ago
  Or build consulting, management and integration partners. Strategic use of tools / trainings, etc. are really important. See how Oracle grows with consulting teams.
philsnow 5y ago
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 5y ago
  :)
stinkytaco 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing about Ecco Pro .. just looked it up : http://jkontherun.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/ecco_calendar.jpg http://jkontherun.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/ecco_calend... Was aware of DabbleDB : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY
- wolpoli 5y ago
  There is also a similar program called InfoQube, which is the work of a single individual: https://www.infoqube.biz/ https://www.infoqube.biz/
getwhatelse 5y ago
Good to see this. Quickest way to build admin apps!
- nocodb 5y ago
  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.
antman 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - poorman 5y ago
    FYI, if anyone plans to build a solution with this that they may at some point want to deploy into Google Cloud Marketplace, you won't be able to. GCP Marketplace does not allow anything to be deployed that is under AGPL.
    - danmur 5y ago
      I don't think anything would stop you dual licensing your own software if you needed to.
      - lazyasciiart 5y ago
        Looks like the license doesn't allow you to do that "This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html
cfitprasad 5y ago
This is cool. Looking forward to playing with our PostgreSQL and MariaDB instances.
abdusco 5y ago
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-plugin https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/master/packages/nc-plu... But there doesn't seem to be any documentation for it yet.
- nocodb 5y ago
  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 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 :)
  - acemarke 5y ago
    FWIW, the very first thing I thought of when I saw SQLite was "huh, I can think of a couple apps where I'd like to upload some images". You could do that with Access, but it struggled with file sizes. SQLite's file format scales nicely (I've used it for MBTiles geodata before). So, would be neat to see that added.
  - irq-1 5y ago
    Looks great. Two things: I do a lot of downloading and uploading CSV files in airtable, so ETL is important. For a self-hosted airtable a huge feature would be connecting to many data sources and munging the data in the app.
sdfhbdf 5y ago
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 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/0.4.9
- nocodb 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
    - nocodb 5y ago
      Thank you for the answer
lardissone 5y ago
Awesome. Tried it and it's so beautiful! Would it be possible to use planetscale as db?
- nocodb 5y ago
  >> 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.
seymores 5y ago
Cool! How to integrate with Okta?
- nocodb 5y ago
  SSO / SAML will be be in enterprise versions.
  - noconoco 5y ago
    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
    - nocodb 5y ago
      We're using developer certificate of origin. Used by nextcloud and likes.
xemoka 5y ago
This looks a lot like baserow.io too; nice to see more projects like this opening up spreadsheet/db alternatives.
- nocodb 5y ago
  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.
  - vidar 5y ago
    What would you say is the current upper bound on the number of records in a table that you support ?
    - nocodb 5y ago
      There is no limit on upperbound - spreadsheet fetches data from your table in database.
      - 1337shadow 5y ago
        Does it updates them in the database?
        nocodb 5y ago
        Yes it does which is what it makes it interesting.
  - Artistry121 5y ago
haolez 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 https://nocodb.com/demos S3 and Google Auth for newbies can be found here : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/master/markdown/plugins https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/master/markdown/plugin... Having said that, we will be working on the documentation series in coming week.
  - haolez 5y ago
    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! :)
    - d0gbread 5y ago
      Agreed. SSO is what would allow a bit of organic use in many organizations and create the demand needed to get a business to spend.
    - haolez 5y ago
      Forgot to add: I'd prefer to pay for a cheaper plan that offers SSO than to self-host it "for free" and not have SSO.
monkeydust 5y ago
Can this pull from home assistant out of interest? Sqllite of influxdb ?
- nocodb 5y ago
  >> 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.
fcsp 5y ago
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-gui/__tests__/xc-tool-web.test.js https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/packages/nc-lib...
- nocodb 5y ago
  Tests are here : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/.github/workflows/node.yml https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/.github/workflo... https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/runs/2687614633?check_suite_focus=true https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/runs/2687614633?check_suite...
  - fcsp 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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/workflows/node.yml#L32 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/.github/workflo... git clone https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb and you can run the same command.
owlbynight 5y ago
This looks amazing, thank you.
- nocodb 5y ago
  Thank you
schemescape 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Thank you for mentioning, what is the safari version ? looks good at 11.1.2
  - schemescape 5y ago
    I’m on iOS 14.4.2, so I think it’s Safari 14.
dadrian 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  Fair enough, having it as open source and work with existing databases opens up entirely new usecase & opportunities.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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-Airtable-be-hosted-on-premise- https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/202576389-Can...
- fragileone 5y ago
syntaxing 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - huihe9849hjjgkg 5y ago
    Great. Where though?
    - nocodb 5y ago
      https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/docker-compose/letsencrypt/nc.sh https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/docker-compose/...
- nacs 5y ago
  If you're worried about that type of security, I'd just get a cheap VPS to run it (they're like $3-5 nowadays). Plus they'll likely have much better uptime/bandwidth than your home server will.
ggregoire 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      not to mention custom feature requests
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Just market to the enterprise buyers. All they want to do is pay for someone to be liable when their system breaks, and many people make lots of money in that business of scapegoating.
- mch82 5y ago
  > when someone copies your product and distribute it legally for free This is society’s collective goal, as exemplified by patents. After ~15 years of legal monopoly, they’re public & anyone can use them. Copyrights take longer, but eventually do the same. Companies plan for this by continuing to introduce incremental product changes, extending the monopoly period in small ways. Take a look at Wordpress, Lego, and Disney who deal with this in different ways.
bayindirh 5y ago
This is AGPL-3.0! Thanks for licensing it this way. It's a bit late here, but I'll try this tomorrow!
louisvgchi 5y ago
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.
- de6u99er 5y ago
  Seems that an enterprise edition is planned: https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/69be190d68a8c527fbacdeb5b1b16fc9c7df4dcc/packages/nc-gui/mixins/device.js#L82-L88 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/69be190d68a8c527fbacde...
hnaccy 5y ago
I'd like to try using this at work for an internal tool but AGPL is a no go.
- awwaiid 5y ago
  If it is an internal tool what is the problem?
- McGlockenshire 5y ago
  All of the AGPL bits are inside that docker container. You don't need to worry about AGPL contamination unless you're modifying the contents of the container. This type of software distributed this way is one of the ideal use cases for the AGPL, IMO.
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Unless you are making changes to its code. Im not sure how would it even affevt you? Also correct me if I am wrong about making source available with your modifications is not uploading it on github. It means your source must be available for your users in any form. If its an internal I dont even see what's the problem there. I would rather have good products on strict license. I rather dont want AWS to leach on this project and launch AWS Elastic Freetable.
sfkeller 5y ago
Promising project. 1. Is there a possibility to limit the ressources allocated to a user? 2. Is there a reason that there's no (possibly restricted) online demo of NocoDB?
jeanlaf 5y ago
That's a great idea, really fit for an open-source use case as there are so many integrations to build. Thanks for this!
peterthehacker 5y ago
Congrats on a successful launch! It’s interesting that this submission is close to beating Airtable’s original Show HN submission from 7 years ago in points [0]. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914
ropable 5y ago
I'd love to try this out, but I can't determine how to make the application accept requests to a hostname other than localhost. We're not all developing on a local machine. Is there documentation available for the app yet?
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Would it be straightforward to integrate with https://n8n.io/ https://n8n.io/ based on the existing no code/low code integrations you have?
- nocodb 5y ago
  This is a demo to create and consume API token. https://youtu.be/AvdEAiKnpg8 https://youtu.be/AvdEAiKnpg8 I believe integration with n8n is possible as we do expose APIs.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Thank you!
arthurcolle 5y ago
Is there a way that I can multiply cells like in Excel? EDIT: I mean like this: =col_name[row_number]*col_name2[row_number2] all within a completely different cell
adamius 5y ago
What an interesting development. Now I can (ab)use a spreadsheet in all sorts of unexpected ways. This appeals to both my lazy and hardworking sides simultaneously. I like the landing page examples as well. Trello/calendar/discord... nice.
aliswe 5y ago
How about CosmosDB? Evidently if youre using it you can pay though, so wouldnt mind if that was an enterprise feature.
nsonha 5y ago
I know that people making these things aren't front-end dev, but could they have picked a more minimal ui library (eg bootstrap) instead of churning out these bloated material designs.
egeozcan 5y ago
Dataflow is another alternative that was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145515
TedShiller 5y ago
Wow! Honestly this is better than airtable
joejohnston 5y ago
I really like the idea, and as the founder of Budibase (https://github.com/Budibase/budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase) an open source low code platform for building internal tools, I wanted to show my support. This is something the market has needed for a while. We integrate with Airtable and when chatting to a lot of users, they have voiced their concerns around a lack of Open Source alternative - most migrate to Budibase's internal tables, but some, mostly non-technical users, prefer the spreadsheet interface. Going forward, I'll recommend your tool, and I wish you all the best :-)
artemonster 5y ago
How do you plan to monetize the project?
mrfusion 5y ago
One service you could offer and charge heavily for is converting customers’ old Access or FileMaker applications to your system. You could automate a bunch of that too.
undecisive 5y ago
It looks pretty, but has some fairly substantial problems. - Data collection: Generally feels nasty these days, especially on something self-hosted. The opt-in-by-default newsletter checkbox might even be illegal in Europe. Don't know what else it might be calling home about without checking the source. - Deceptive data collection: The HotJar survey popping up starts making you think maybe it needs to know where you host images so that it can handle image uploads... but no, it just wants to collect data and dial home - Docs say that the docker instance starts on port 8080 - it isn't, it's on 5000 - Email and password validation: it's a little thing, but that should be at least configurable. Valid emails can contain "+" character. - Couldn't work out how to connect from one docker instance to a second docker instance mysql database. Might need some kind of docker-compose setup though, I didn't look that long - Couldn't create a new database either. It said it created, but then wouldn't let me add a table, just errored. No idea why on that one. And that's kinda where I gave up.

562 points by nocodb 5y ago

Hey Everybody, We are really excited to open source NocoDB today. NocoDB is an open source Airtable alternative. Github : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb 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 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb - Discord : https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW - Twitter : https://twitter.com/nocodb https://twitter.com/nocodb Would love to hear usecases & feedback. Thank you, Team NocoDB edit : made the comment short :)

jasonblais 5y ago
This is an exciting release! Look forward to seeing how this project takes off.
- nocodb 5y ago
  Thank you. Getting started is really simple - please check below. docker run -p 8080:8080 nocodb/nocodb or npx create-nocodb-app
yarapavan 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Yes, its just like your google spreadsheets. You can insert/edit/delete. And share views with and without password.
  - steveharman 5y ago
    Fantastic, thanks!
_jal 5y ago
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 5y ago
  >> 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 5y ago
  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 https://stackerhq.com
Artistry121 5y ago
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 5y ago
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 also has 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 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/ https://www.hotjar.com/ This is where I stopped evaluating your product LOL --------------------------------- Clicking on Calendar, Kanban, and Form results in a "Coming soon" message. Which is curious since, your website demonstrates it already. --------------------------------- Those rules saying delete cascade seem to be nonsense. I was able to delete rows in both tables (country, company) without any cascading happening which would result in an inconsistent state. --> Foreign keys seem only to exist within your applications metamodel and they don't seem to be respected accordingly. --------------------------------- My final verdict: You have a lot of work ahead of you if you want to bring this into a production ready state. Until then I recommend to others not using it with your production databases, and because of coming with the hotjar user action tracking tool not use and privacy related data with it.
- 5y ago
syrusakbary 5y ago
This is awesome!! I'm also super excited about this. You should apply to YCombinator S21 batch! (feel free to use my reference: syrusakbary if you would like!) https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/ https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
I'm very excited, looking at the GitHub stars in just 24 hours after launch it looks like many others are. This looks like a text book example of successful 'Show HN' launch. So my question is really regarding this launch, rather than NocoDB itself as all pertinent questions regarding it seems to have been asked. I see you have got some feedback on your website regarding NocoDB after production deployment by some companies, How long you folks have been developing NocoDB? Were you using your personal funds for development? All the best, Hope NoCoDB turns out to be another successful dual-licensed startup.
prox 5y ago
Is there any way to turn this into a desktop app?
- nocodb 5y ago
  In our 2nd iteration this was a desktop app that could connect to database, create-edit schema and generate code and was without spreadsheet.
tecleandor 5y ago
Hi! FYI, I think you are using the wrong logo on Vasyl Rakivnenko testimonial. You using the Spanish Servired (a bank network) logo instead of the Polish Servired (Road Transportation). I think this is the correct one: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servired-sp-z-o-o-/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/servired-sp-z-o-o-/
- nocodb 5y ago
  Thanks a tonne, fixed it.
towelpluswater 5y ago
This is neat, nice work. Any plans to add Snowflake as a database?
- seektable 5y ago
  Snowflake is a DW solution - in most cases it is populated from other OLTP DBs and uses as a data source for BI tools. What is the purpose of editing data directly in Snowflake?..
croes 5y ago
Can't seem to get it to run on Windows 10 via npx or git clone. Both ways show error 9009, failed at the sqlite3@5.0.0 install script.

handoyosutanto 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb-seed/blob/main/index.js Just mount nocodb into your express.js and it's done.
- agustif 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        ah ok. Was this on windows ? You might have to start command prompt with administrator privileges. Some of our users ran into these.

drannex 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb-seed/blob/main/index.js

honkycat 5y ago

Why didn't I think of this. Looks awesome!

nocodb 5y ago
Please give it a try & join our discord community https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW https://discord.gg/5RgZmkW

endisneigh 5y ago

Looks good - for monetization you should make the integrations paid and the core thing free.

nocodb 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Much like Wordpress plugins ?
- gwbrooks 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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?
- tyingq 5y ago
  Charging for plugins might be tricky, given the AGPL licensing.
Artistry121 5y ago
Or build consulting, management and integration partners. Strategic use of tools / trainings, etc. are really important. See how Oracle grows with consulting teams.

philsnow 5y ago

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 5y ago
:)

stinkytaco 5y ago

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 5y ago
Thanks for sharing about Ecco Pro .. just looked it up : http://jkontherun.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/ecco_calendar.jpg http://jkontherun.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/ecco_calend... Was aware of DabbleDB : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wZmYMWKLkY
wolpoli 5y ago
There is also a similar program called InfoQube, which is the work of a single individual: https://www.infoqube.biz/ https://www.infoqube.biz/

getwhatelse 5y ago

Good to see this. Quickest way to build admin apps!

nocodb 5y ago
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.

antman 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- poorman 5y ago
  FYI, if anyone plans to build a solution with this that they may at some point want to deploy into Google Cloud Marketplace, you won't be able to. GCP Marketplace does not allow anything to be deployed that is under AGPL.
  - danmur 5y ago
    I don't think anything would stop you dual licensing your own software if you needed to.
    - lazyasciiart 5y ago
      Looks like the license doesn't allow you to do that "This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it." https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

cfitprasad 5y ago

This is cool. Looking forward to playing with our PostgreSQL and MariaDB instances.

abdusco 5y ago

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-plugin https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/master/packages/nc-plu... But there doesn't seem to be any documentation for it yet.

nocodb 5y ago
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 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 :)
- acemarke 5y ago
  FWIW, the very first thing I thought of when I saw SQLite was "huh, I can think of a couple apps where I'd like to upload some images". You could do that with Access, but it struggled with file sizes. SQLite's file format scales nicely (I've used it for MBTiles geodata before). So, would be neat to see that added.
- irq-1 5y ago
  Looks great. Two things: I do a lot of downloading and uploading CSV files in airtable, so ETL is important. For a self-hosted airtable a huge feature would be connecting to many data sources and munging the data in the app.

sdfhbdf 5y ago

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 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/0.4.9

nocodb 5y ago
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 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - nocodb 5y ago
    Thank you for the answer

lardissone 5y ago

Awesome. Tried it and it's so beautiful! Would it be possible to use planetscale as db?

nocodb 5y ago
>> 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.

seymores 5y ago

Cool! How to integrate with Okta?

nocodb 5y ago
SSO / SAML will be be in enterprise versions.
- noconoco 5y ago
  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
  - nocodb 5y ago
    We're using developer certificate of origin. Used by nextcloud and likes.

xemoka 5y ago

This looks a lot like baserow.io too; nice to see more projects like this opening up spreadsheet/db alternatives.

nocodb 5y ago
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.
- vidar 5y ago
  What would you say is the current upper bound on the number of records in a table that you support ?
  - nocodb 5y ago
    There is no limit on upperbound - spreadsheet fetches data from your table in database.
    - 1337shadow 5y ago
      Does it updates them in the database?
      - nocodb 5y ago
        Yes it does which is what it makes it interesting.
- Artistry121 5y ago

haolez 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 https://nocodb.com/demos S3 and Google Auth for newbies can be found here : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/master/markdown/plugins https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/master/markdown/plugin... Having said that, we will be working on the documentation series in coming week.
- haolez 5y ago
  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! :)
  - d0gbread 5y ago
    Agreed. SSO is what would allow a bit of organic use in many organizations and create the demand needed to get a business to spend.
  - haolez 5y ago
    Forgot to add: I'd prefer to pay for a cheaper plan that offers SSO than to self-host it "for free" and not have SSO.

monkeydust 5y ago

Can this pull from home assistant out of interest? Sqllite of influxdb ?

nocodb 5y ago
>> 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.

fcsp 5y ago

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-gui/__tests__/xc-tool-web.test.js https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/packages/nc-lib...

nocodb 5y ago
Tests are here : https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/.github/workflows/node.yml https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/.github/workflo... https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/runs/2687614633?check_suite_focus=true https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/runs/2687614633?check_suite...
- fcsp 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
      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/workflows/node.yml#L32 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/.github/workflo... git clone https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb and you can run the same command.

owlbynight 5y ago

This looks amazing, thank you.

nocodb 5y ago
Thank you

schemescape 5y ago

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 5y ago
Thank you for mentioning, what is the safari version ? looks good at 11.1.2
- schemescape 5y ago
  I’m on iOS 14.4.2, so I think it’s Safari 14.

dadrian 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
Fair enough, having it as open source and work with existing databases opens up entirely new usecase & opportunities.
vineyardmike 5y ago
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 5y ago
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-Airtable-be-hosted-on-premise- https://support.airtable.com/hc/en-us/articles/202576389-Can...
fragileone 5y ago

syntaxing 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- huihe9849hjjgkg 5y ago
  Great. Where though?
  - nocodb 5y ago
    https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/docker-compose/letsencrypt/nc.sh https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/master/docker-compose/...
nacs 5y ago
If you're worried about that type of security, I'd just get a cheap VPS to run it (they're like $3-5 nowadays). Plus they'll likely have much better uptime/bandwidth than your home server will.

ggregoire 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    not to mention custom feature requests
smoldesu 5y ago
Just market to the enterprise buyers. All they want to do is pay for someone to be liable when their system breaks, and many people make lots of money in that business of scapegoating.
mch82 5y ago
> when someone copies your product and distribute it legally for free This is society’s collective goal, as exemplified by patents. After ~15 years of legal monopoly, they’re public & anyone can use them. Copyrights take longer, but eventually do the same. Companies plan for this by continuing to introduce incremental product changes, extending the monopoly period in small ways. Take a look at Wordpress, Lego, and Disney who deal with this in different ways.

bayindirh 5y ago

This is AGPL-3.0! Thanks for licensing it this way. It's a bit late here, but I'll try this tomorrow!

louisvgchi 5y ago

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.

de6u99er 5y ago
Seems that an enterprise edition is planned: https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/69be190d68a8c527fbacdeb5b1b16fc9c7df4dcc/packages/nc-gui/mixins/device.js#L82-L88 https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/blob/69be190d68a8c527fbacde...

hnaccy 5y ago

I'd like to try using this at work for an internal tool but AGPL is a no go.

awwaiid 5y ago
If it is an internal tool what is the problem?
McGlockenshire 5y ago
All of the AGPL bits are inside that docker container. You don't need to worry about AGPL contamination unless you're modifying the contents of the container. This type of software distributed this way is one of the ideal use cases for the AGPL, IMO.
anaganisk 5y ago
Unless you are making changes to its code. Im not sure how would it even affevt you? Also correct me if I am wrong about making source available with your modifications is not uploading it on github. It means your source must be available for your users in any form. If its an internal I dont even see what's the problem there. I would rather have good products on strict license. I rather dont want AWS to leach on this project and launch AWS Elastic Freetable.

sfkeller 5y ago

Promising project. 1. Is there a possibility to limit the ressources allocated to a user? 2. Is there a reason that there's no (possibly restricted) online demo of NocoDB?

jeanlaf 5y ago

That's a great idea, really fit for an open-source use case as there are so many integrations to build. Thanks for this!

peterthehacker 5y ago

Congrats on a successful launch! It’s interesting that this submission is close to beating Airtable’s original Show HN submission from 7 years ago in points [0]. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8373914

ropable 5y ago

I'd love to try this out, but I can't determine how to make the application accept requests to a hostname other than localhost. We're not all developing on a local machine. Is there documentation available for the app yet?

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Would it be straightforward to integrate with https://n8n.io/ https://n8n.io/ based on the existing no code/low code integrations you have?

nocodb 5y ago
This is a demo to create and consume API token. https://youtu.be/AvdEAiKnpg8 https://youtu.be/AvdEAiKnpg8 I believe integration with n8n is possible as we do expose APIs.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Thank you!

arthurcolle 5y ago

Is there a way that I can multiply cells like in Excel? EDIT: I mean like this: =col_name[row_number]*col_name2[row_number2] all within a completely different cell

adamius 5y ago

What an interesting development. Now I can (ab)use a spreadsheet in all sorts of unexpected ways. This appeals to both my lazy and hardworking sides simultaneously. I like the landing page examples as well. Trello/calendar/discord... nice.

aliswe 5y ago

How about CosmosDB? Evidently if youre using it you can pay though, so wouldnt mind if that was an enterprise feature.

nsonha 5y ago

I know that people making these things aren't front-end dev, but could they have picked a more minimal ui library (eg bootstrap) instead of churning out these bloated material designs.

egeozcan 5y ago

Dataflow is another alternative that was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27145515

TedShiller 5y ago

Wow! Honestly this is better than airtable

joejohnston 5y ago

I really like the idea, and as the founder of Budibase (https://github.com/Budibase/budibase https://github.com/Budibase/budibase) an open source low code platform for building internal tools, I wanted to show my support. This is something the market has needed for a while. We integrate with Airtable and when chatting to a lot of users, they have voiced their concerns around a lack of Open Source alternative - most migrate to Budibase's internal tables, but some, mostly non-technical users, prefer the spreadsheet interface. Going forward, I'll recommend your tool, and I wish you all the best :-)

artemonster 5y ago

How do you plan to monetize the project?

mrfusion 5y ago

One service you could offer and charge heavily for is converting customers’ old Access or FileMaker applications to your system. You could automate a bunch of that too.

undecisive 5y ago

It looks pretty, but has some fairly substantial problems. - Data collection: Generally feels nasty these days, especially on something self-hosted. The opt-in-by-default newsletter checkbox might even be illegal in Europe. Don't know what else it might be calling home about without checking the source. - Deceptive data collection: The HotJar survey popping up starts making you think maybe it needs to know where you host images so that it can handle image uploads... but no, it just wants to collect data and dial home - Docs say that the docker instance starts on port 8080 - it isn't, it's on 5000 - Email and password validation: it's a little thing, but that should be at least configurable. Valid emails can contain "+" character. - Couldn't work out how to connect from one docker instance to a second docker instance mysql database. Might need some kind of docker-compose setup though, I didn't look that long - Couldn't create a new database either. It said it created, but then wouldn't let me add a table, just errored. No idea why on that one. And that's kinda where I gave up.