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Hi Simon, thanks so much for taking the time. Been following your excellent work with Django for many years. We took a look at DS several months ago (I believe

Hi Simon, thanks so much for taking the time. Been following your excellent work with Django for many years. We took a look at DS several months ago (I believe it popped up here on HN) but I confess that until I read the linked article I hadn’t fully understood that it was a “hammer”, and a good one at that. At that time we set it aside in favour of AirTable which for our purposes - to relate this to one of your other comments here - is sort of Access with a web interface plus authentication and (frankly not very granular) authorisation. The main reason was because it seemed to us that Datasette didn’t have first class support for auth - that it was sort of positioned as a community or internal tool, rather than something we could build out a client interface on. I just had a look at the plugins and noted that there is something for auth, although it too looks rather to be for internal tooling. Is that a fair characterisation, or do we have it wrong? Because we love everything else about DS - open source, built on SQL and SQLite, etc. - and would vastly prefer to use it over AirTable.

simonw 4y ago
Airtable is a fantastic piece of software. I'd love Datasette to work as an alternative for it some day but there is a whole lot of stuff to build to get there. The most relevant plugin for what you're describing at the moment is probably the Auth0 one: https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-auth0 https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-auth0 Quite a lot of assembly is required at the moment if you want to do interesting custom things with authentication and permissions - the documentation here is the best starting point: https://docs.datasette.io/en/stable/authentication.html https://docs.datasette.io/en/stable/authentication.html
- darkteflon 4y ago
  Fantastic - thanks Simon, much appreciated. Yes we generally like the AirTable UX, too, and it’s a good fit for client-facing stuff in addition to internal tooling. It is slow, though, and there are no native desktop or mobile clients. Mainly, though: building a business on it comes with all the usual pitfalls of VC-backed SaaS. It’s very helpful to hear your thoughts on the project’s trajectory. We’ll take another look at DS and the auth0 module, thanks. It looks very promising and we don’t mind a bit of assembly.
  - darkteflon 4y ago
    Replying to myself to say that - with hilarious timing - one of our business-critical AirTable bases is suddenly throwing an error and has become completely inaccessible right when we need it. AirTable support does its best to try to funnel you into the "helpful community". Cancelling our subscription today and migrating to Datasette, hell or high water. Glad this happened now and not 2 years down the track.

simonw 4y ago

Airtable is a fantastic piece of software. I'd love Datasette to work as an alternative for it some day but there is a whole lot of stuff to build to get there. The most relevant plugin for what you're describing at the moment is probably the Auth0 one: https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-auth0 https://datasette.io/plugins/datasette-auth0 Quite a lot of assembly is required at the moment if you want to do interesting custom things with authentication and permissions - the documentation here is the best starting point: https://docs.datasette.io/en/stable/authentication.html https://docs.datasette.io/en/stable/authentication.html

darkteflon 4y ago
Fantastic - thanks Simon, much appreciated. Yes we generally like the AirTable UX, too, and it’s a good fit for client-facing stuff in addition to internal tooling. It is slow, though, and there are no native desktop or mobile clients. Mainly, though: building a business on it comes with all the usual pitfalls of VC-backed SaaS. It’s very helpful to hear your thoughts on the project’s trajectory. We’ll take another look at DS and the auth0 module, thanks. It looks very promising and we don’t mind a bit of assembly.
- darkteflon 4y ago
  Replying to myself to say that - with hilarious timing - one of our business-critical AirTable bases is suddenly throwing an error and has become completely inaccessible right when we need it. AirTable support does its best to try to funnel you into the "helpful community". Cancelling our subscription today and migrating to Datasette, hell or high water. Glad this happened now and not 2 years down the track.