Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

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Hi dvdhsu, this looks great. At Thread we build lots of internal tools, but would like to be able to build more. We currently use ChartIO to build dashboards, but some of these have become almost like mini read-only apps that teams use, it would be great to make some of these into something a bit more useful and Retool sounds like it has the potential to be a good fit.

Some questions I would have as an engineer...

1. Where's the documentation - it's not linked to on the site.

2. What's your GDPR policy, we have customer data in our database.

3. Can this do Slack bots? We use them quite a bit for reporting, would be handy!

4. What sort of auth schemes do you offer? We provide limited access to some of our tools to third parties who aren't on our Google Apps domain.

5. What sort of APIs do you support. We have some basic JSON+HTTP things that require a session cookie to use because they are only used in web pages we run, and we have an authenticated GraphQL API. Would these work? How do you handle authentication on APIs?

1. docs.tryretool.com - we just added it - thanks!

2. You can install Retool in your EC2 instance, and block all inbound / outbound network traffic. I'll send you an email about it!

3. Yes - we can! Curious to hear about your use case though - is it for BI?

4. We integrate with Google, Okta or any SAML 2.0 provider. Would that work for you guys?

5. Any! Yep - we handle authentication in the API query itself, or you can create an API with authentication stored server-side. Here are docs on generic APIs: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/apis, and here are docs on GraphQL: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/graphql

WRT cookies specifically - even though requests from the browser get proxied through our backend we support forwarding authentication cookies to the browser that is tied to the user's specific session in Retool. (I thought we had written docs for this but can't find them now. Ping me @ david@tryretool.com and I can tell you how we do it!)

Nice!

For the Slack bots, a fairly common thing we want to do is regular business updates from either Google spreadsheets (that are very dynamic/scripted) or from ChartIO. Some basic interactivity with those bots would be handy.

Interesting! Retool might be a good fit then - I'll reach out over email. Thanks!

Please add me to the list of people to talk about the install on EC2 Instance options, docker would be preferable though.

David this looks fantastic. I can’t wait to play with it.

Just on the GDPR front, our DB also has customer data. We currently host on heroku. Does the data we pull in / process using retool go anywhere else except for where we point it?

No, your data never goes anywhere. You can deploy Retool and airgap it to prevent all inbound / outbound network connections. Then you can connect to it via a VPN.

I will reach out over email - thanks for the question!

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