Nocodb: Turns Any MySQL, Postgres, SQLite into a Spreadsheet with REST APIs | Hacker News Reader

Nocodb: Turns Any MySQL, Postgres, SQLite into a Spreadsheet with REST APIs

github.com

189 pointsthunderbong36 comments

Congrats rnavi and team on making it to HN front page again! I've continued to follow and enjoyed using it. I'd recommend to try it for Airtable-esque usecases (or independent of it too).

For those who are hearing about Nocodb here for the first time, it was listed in 'Show HN' about an year ago [1][2]. It had 2M+ docker downloads in 16 weeks when it showed up in HN and ProductHunt. And, a user/customer found Nocodb in HN and wrote an angel check [3].

The project has 30K Github and is one of the fastest growing open source projects in the world. All of the code + integration plugins like storage (S3,Google cloud storage, Minio, DO spaces), Email (SES,SMTP) and chat (Twilio,slack,Teams) are all open source too [4][5]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27303783

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29176436

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28606258

[4] https://docs.nocodb.com/setup-and-usages/app-store

[5] https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb/tree/8b863ca3d822abc5a24b29...

It's an app available in https://www.pikapods.com by $1.5/month. In case anyone is looking for an alternative to self-hosting

IANAL, but given the AGPL license of the project, you may be violating their license in multiple ways.

Only if they have altered the code (and don’t make it available)…

That's not how AGPL works, it allows anyone to do commercial hosting.

Similarly for Postgres, but without the spreadsheet part: https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest

yeah, this is a key component of supabase (which you get out of the box if you host postgres with them).

I doubt I'll ever host postgres anywhere else but supabase at this point. The cost is competive with AWS/GCP but you get a ton of tools (like auth) built in.

I want this exact thing for SQLite, nothing good exists

https://github.com/mevdschee/php-crud-api does not have the features you need?

Postgrest has excellent security setup, which is tightly integrated into postgres, I mean there are, by obvious design, no real paradigms for SQLite

https://github.com/jeffknupp/sandman2 works with many different backends including sqlite, but postgrest definitely have the auth flow and security model right for these things.

Anything compiled and not Python like Go, Rust etc.?

Founder of noco here.

We do support SQLite as well and it comes with litestream baked in within our docker.

https://pocketbase.io/

Seems very promising!

Seems most promising but the reply was to postgrest, because I really don't need a UI

Nocodb seems to create REST API endpoints for SQLite. Might be worth checking this project out.

Here it is =) https://github.com/wundergraph/wunderbase

No, still not there, but perhaps running in conjunction with that wundergraph API gateway will get me most of the way

But I also like the simplicity of just REST and feel like the postgrest people have figured that out

And for GraphQL: https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/

I came across nocodb when I was looking for an alternative to Airtable, which is laughably underpowered (e.g. no way to query tables with any kind of expressiveness) despite having an amazing UI. I ultimately didn’t want to self-host so I moved on, but may look at giving it a shot again as nothing has really fit the bill.

I am working at finn.auto. We are using Nocodb extensively and are a big contributor to the project. We have a lot of open tech positions and some of our engineers focus on contributing to Noco directly. Check out https://www.finn.auto/careers

Let me know if you are interested and I can tell you more or put you in touch with our team working on this.

Shame that you don't need senior backenders. I just finished a very toxic contract and I'm looking for more stable employment. And I'm very interested in the area that Noco is serving.

But still, if you need a very practical guy with 20 years of career who is now mainly working with Elixir and Rust, give me a ping.

We‘re working on something similar at airsequel.com. Except GraphQL API instead of REST, focus on only SQLite, and hosting is taken care of by us.

very cool. i wish i had a csv file handy to try it on my phone.

Is there a similar project that's written in golang? I love datasette, and this looked promising when I tried it a couple months back. But I am spoiled by golang's staticly linked binaries. I'd love to have a library that I can embed and use it as a makeshift UI over a (sqlite) db

There is PocketBase[0], which seems to be very similar, never used it, I'm just aware of it's existence.

[0] https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase

> Is there a similar project that's written in golang?

This is something I like from rust and go, it's just a binary portable file, somehow unrelated, but gitea was an awesome discovery to me.

We do ship binaries for all platform. Lot of our users run it on Raspberry PI. However there is no static library though.

I am using it in a daily basis for the last 4 months. Very useful and promising in terms of features.

What are you using it for? How big is your database (e.g. number of records)?

I am using for dumping security reports (vulnerabilities fetched from other platforms) and then quickly generating views for managers (cleanup and aesthetics in a way they understand). I am using it to manage staff on-call and off hours work as well as freelance contracts. Until now the unique integration I've enabled is to notify some teams on Slack. Anyways I miss some features like adding some math formulas in some fields. It is still very lean tool (few features)

In my quest for a cool usefull nocode tool I've not found anything that is one solution that fits all. The cool drag and drop frontend solutions are only for internal tools and the api/admin stuff like nocodb is limited on that side. Perhaps I need to find a javascript frontend that connects with nocodb, with drag and drop etc.

How about https://perspective.finos.org/

This feels like a self-hosted sharepoint lists with more/better integrations and views. A killer tool to be sure.

EDIT: Oh, most of the stuff that made it competitive in my eyes is "coming soon". Well, I'll keep an eye on it for sure, hope it turns out well.

Demos: https://docs.nocodb.com/getting-started/demos

Unfortunately, these tools only provide basic record listings with form views.

Except for being able to render images, they don't do much more that database browsing tools.

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