Introducing Rowy: Open-source Airtable-like platform for managing Firestore data and Google Cloud Functions
It is 2021 — you should not be limited to a cloud console UI for managing your data and tinkering with CLIs on terminals for deploying cloud functions.
Google’s Firestore is great for building and launching scalable apps fast on the serverless stack. There is a drawback though — the Firestore UI looks like this.
It is hard to navigate the nested document store and the UI is not intuitive. I have personally faced this challenge many times when building products on Firebase. Only developers have access to the data and you don’t want to waste their time to build yet another internal portal or data download script. This is one of the main reasons why we built Rowy — an open-source platform to manage your data in an intuitive spreadsheet-like UI. Say goodbye to emailing that “vFinalFinal” Excel sheet.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. We also questioned why cloud functions need to be built the way they do now. From starting with a boilerplate code on editors to deploying using CLI on terminals to finally looking at the logs on Google Cloud console. Why?
We wanted to flip the script by making the process of building and deploying cloud functions effortless, right in the browser and in the view of your data. No dev ops, CI/CD, CLIs, or reading docs. It just works.
While we are at it, doesn’t it also make sense to have pre-built commonly used functions and extensions to connect to your favorite third-party tools? We did just that.
With a goal to help developers focus on building their product functionality fast, we built Rowy with ❤️. Our code is open source, you fully own your data and your data stays on your own GCP/Firestore project.
Let’s see how you can build on GCP within minutes
First, you can get setup quickly with this link below to deploy Rowy on your Google Cloud/Firebase project.
Once setup is complete, you should be able to access your Firestore data in a collaborative spreadsheet-like UI and perform any CRUD operations.
This is just the start. There is so much more you can do here.
Build your data model visually
As a first step in building any product, you can build your Firestore data model visually by simply clicking the “Add table” and “Add column” buttons. Choose from 30+ fields including complex data fields like images, files, rich text, sub-tables, code, flexible fields like JSON and more.
Powerful and rich spreadsheet-like UI
Manage your data intuitively on a familiar spreadsheet-like UI with all the functionality and features that come with it.
⚡️ Bulk import and export data — CSV, JSON
⚡️ Filter and sort data fields
⚡️ Create your custom flexible views by locking, freezing, hiding columns. Admins have full control over their data views for different user roles, i.e. you can create data portals customized for your operations team, marketing, developers, PMs … or any user really.
Collaborate with your team
Invite your team members to collaborate on the data and give them specific granular CRUD permissions at a table-level and field-level using custom roles.
Connect to your favorite tools
With ready-made extensions to Typeform, SendGrid, Algolia, Twilio, Big Query and more, you can connect to your favorite third-party tools. Also, you have full flexibility to customize these pre-built extensions or build your own.
Multiple views for the same data collection
You can have more than one way to look at the same Firestore collection by using flexible table views with unique table IDs. You can build table and column views for your different team members with unique roles.
Default values, data validation, required fields
Allowing non-technical users to make changes to production data is scary. To address this, Rowy not only allows permission and access controls at a table-level and field-level but also the ability to validate any field-level CRUD operations with regex checks to ensure critical data is always accurate before updating your Firestore document. You can also define default values for fields (static, null, custom) and make fields mandatory for row creation.
Write cloud functions
You can build cloud functions that are triggered on any field-level data changes. Easy deploy, no need for terminals, CLIs and boilerplate code. Import npm packages and use any API. Read full documentation here.
If you like what we are building, give Rowy a quick spin on your Firebase project using the button below.
This runs Rowy Run (an open-source Cloud Run instance) that operates exclusively on your GCP project. We will never have access to your service account or any of your data. Alternatively, you can also manually install using the steps detailed.
