Whether you’re a productivity enthusiast looking to track your projects or a business owner on the prowl for a workflow organization utility, relational database management apps can solve your task management woes. Among them, Airtable is often considered the king of the hill with its automation facilities, multiple view types, and tons of integrations with professional platforms.

But since you’ll have to rely on Airtable’s servers to store your precious data(bases), it’s not the best option for privacy-conscious users. That’s where NocoDB shines with its self-hosted nature, and here’s everything you need to get started with the app.

What’s NocoDB, anyway?

And why should you use it?

Designed as an open-source alternative to Airtable, NocoDB is the closest you’ll get to a self-hosted service that offers similar task management utilities. For instance, you can switch between Grid, Gallery, Kanban, and other data views to organize your tasks. NocoDB also lets you access advanced sorting, filtering, grouping, and search features and even lets you import your Airtable datasets with ease.

But unlike its rival, a self-hosted NocoDB instance supports unlimited rows (records) and users while letting you leverage numerous webhooks and APIs to automate your workflows. Add the integrations with other database utilities as well as several collaboration provisions, and you’re all set to manage your tasks like a pro with NocoDB.

Hosting a NocoDB server

If you’re a self-hosting veteran, you’ll know that there are a bunch of ways to deploy a NocoDB instance. As always, the Proxmox VE-Helper Scripts repository provides an easy means to host NocoDB on your local PVE server. All you have to do is:

1. Open the Shell tab of your favorite Proxmox node.
2. Paste this command inside the terminal UI and hit Enter:

   bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/raw/main/ct/nocodb.sh)"

3. Tap Yes when Proxmox asks for confirmation before choosing Default Settings for the NocoDB container.
4. Wait for Proxmox to deploy the NocoDB server before using the link inside the terminal to access the web UI.

If you don't have a Proxmox machine, you can host NocoDB as a container inside a Linux distribution. Assuming you’ve got Docker set up on the PC/virtual machine,

1. Launch the terminal app included with your Linux distro.
2. Download the NocoDB image using the docker pull command:

   sudo docker pull nocodb/nocodb:latest

3. Execute the docker run command with the following parameters to deploy the NocoDB container:

   sudo docker run -d --name nocodb -v "$(pwd)"/nocodb:/usr/app/data/ -p 8080:8080 nocodb/nocodb:latest

4. You can access the NocoDB web UI by typing localhost:8080 into your favorite web browser. Alternatively, you can replace the localhost string with the IP address of your system to access the web UI from other devices connected to the same network as the NocoDB host.

Configuring the NocoDB web UI

Regardless of the method you used to deploy NocoDB, the web UI will be the same. If NocoDB’s interface seems overwhelming, here are some quick tips to help you get started:

1. When you log into NocoDB for the first time, the app will ask you to enter the Email and Password to create a superuser for the workspace.
2. Once you’re inside the NocoDB dashboard, you can start things off by tapping the Create Base button.
3. Depending on your projects, you can either Create a New table, Import Data (from a pre-existing database), or Connect to an External Database.
4. To add new users, you can enter their Emails and Access privileges inside the Add Members option of the Members tab.
5. After you’ve added/imported some records, you can use the Create Views utility to switch between Kanban, Grid, Form, Gallery, and Calendar views.

Build a productivity war machine with NocoDB

With that, you should be well-equipped to integrate NocoDB into your workflow. Of course, NocoDB has plenty of other useful features. For instance, the App Store tab lets you connect your NocoDB workspace with other utilities. Likewise, you can generate personal API keys to link your NocoDB instance with automation utilities like n8n.