Up and Running with Netlify, Airtable, and React

If you want a free and relatively easy stack to quickly build and deploy portfolio projects, Netlify, Airtable and React make a great trio. I’m currently using these tools to build Cascara, a web application for finding local independent coffeehouses. Since I couldn’t find a good tutorial on how to set up these three tools to work together, I’m writing one.

I use these tools to build serverless web applications because they’re user friendly and are either completely free to use or have free tiers — the perfect combination for a developer straight out of college. As your web application scales, you may want to switch to an architecture more robust, but if you’re learning and want to build cool stuff for free — let’s do it.

Overview

Netlify is a jack-of-all-trades service that provides hosting for static sites with automatic deploys from GitHub, environment variables, serverless functions, a great local development server, and a lot more. It has a great user interface and documentation, making it beginner friendly. You’ll need to sign up for an account to get started.

Airtable is another multi-functional tool that has a great visual database system that automatically generates a project-specific API for you. It can also be used as a project management tool. Again, you’ll need to…