Airtable data loader

Here’s a TypeScript data loader that reads values from a database hosted on Airtable.

It uses the airtable.js development kit. See the official API documentation, which allows you to select your database for “live documentation” running on your own data; make sure to select the “JavaScript” tab.

To run this data loader, you’ll need to create a personal access token at /create/tokens and save its value in the .env file at the root of the project. (Mine is scoped to only read values from the penguins database.) In that same .env file, you will also specify the database id:

AIRTABLE_PAT="patXXXXX.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
AIRTABLE_DB="appWXXXXXXXXX"

The data loader’s code:

import "dotenv/config";
import Airtable from "airtable";
import {csvFormat} from "d3-dsv";

const {AIRTABLE_PAT, AIRTABLE_DB} = process.env;

Airtable.configure({apiKey: AIRTABLE_PAT});

const base = Airtable.base(AIRTABLE_DB as string);

const data: any[] = [];

base("penguins")
  .select({view: "Grid view"})
  .eachPage(
    (records, fetchNextPage) => {
      records.forEach((record) => data.push(record.fields));
      fetchNextPage();
    },
    (err) => {
      if (err) throw err;
      process.stdout.write(csvFormat(data));
    }
  );

It lives in data/penguins.csv.ts, so we can load the data using data/penguins.csv.

const penguins = FileAttachment("./data/penguins.csv").csv({typed: true});