I want to share my experience when using Retool to build a web application for my company. Retool is a simple, easy-to-use web tool and applications builder. It is known as a no-code web app builder. Well, it is not totally code-free but it is excellent for beginners to advanced users. So in this article and in the future, I want to share my learning experience with you guys. I will not explain Retool here. It is better to directly go to their website and try it yourself. It is free.
In this article, we will learn the following:
- Create a new Retool account
- Create a new simple web app
- Create and connect to the database
To get started, we need to create a new Retool account. You can use your Gmail account and then create a new subdomain.
And that’s it. We can start building our first web App. Below is the Retool main window where we manage our Apps, Databases, and so on.
Retool supports many databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, and many more. It also supports various APIs such as Amazon S3, Google Maps, GitHub, and much more.
Connect to Database
OK, so I am going to build a simple app that will display a MySQL table. First, we will connect to the database. Go to the Resources page and then select the resource type. In this case, I choose MySQL because I am about to use my existing MySQL Server. Enter your database information such as hostname, username, password, and database name.
Create First Retool App
From the Retool Home, click Create New and then choose From Database. We will make a simple app using our MySQL table. In the next step, choose the Resource and give the App name.
Click Next and then select the Table that we want to use. On the following page, we need to specify the column that will be used in the search box. You can change the Input type.
Click Create App and in a few seconds, our first App is ready.
Now we can modify, add or delete components as we go. On the bottom left, we can see the Codes that are used in this app. We can add more code and queries to our project. Click the Preview button on the top right to view our App.
That’s it. We will dig more in future posts.