Airtable Blog (demo)

This project demonstrates using Next.js to server-side render markdown in React using the markdown-it-renderer, and hosting all of the blog posts on Airtable.

Admittedly, there are some hacks going on here, but the point is to create a proof of concept for a simple micro-service with a low amount of developer maintenance.

Furthermore, markdown-it-renderer is built in such a way that you should be able to create you're own custom components and render them in markdown.

Getting Setup

Sign up with Airtable, create a new "base" with a table named "Posts". Add two fields -- "Markdown" should be a Long text field, and "Date Published" should be a Date field. Create a demo post, and it should look like this:

Now clone this repo, create a file called env.sh, and install the NPM dependencies:

git clone [email protected]:ccorcos/airtable-blog.git
cd airtable-blog
touch env.sh
npm install

Inside env.sh you need to export three variables:

export AIRTABLE_API_KEY='XXX'
export AIRTABLE_BASE_NAME='XXX'
export PASSWORD='XXX'

You can create an Airtable api key here.

You can get the base name by going here clicking on the base you just created, and then looking at the very first example -- there should be a cURL request that looks like this:

curl https://api.airtable.com/v0/$AIRTABLE_BASE_NAME/Posts \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Lastly, set up a password you are going to use to authenticate requests for creating posts.

You can run it locally:

npm run dev

Or you can throw it up on the interwebs with Now.sh

npm run deploy