Creating personal access tokens
  • 04 Mar 2024
  • 3 Minutes to read
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Creating personal access tokens

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    Light
  • PDF

Article Summary

Plan availability

All plan types. Certain features are only available to Enterprise Scale or Business plan customers.

Permissions

Permission contingent - The scopes and access that you can set up with personal access tokens will reflect the permissions that you have in the various workspaces and bases connected to your Airtable account.

Platform(s)

Web/Browser, Mac app, and Windows app

Related reading

Understanding the basics of Personal Access Tokens

Personal Access Tokens or PATs allow users to create multiple access tokens that allow for a wide range of access to the information held in Airtable bases. For example, on the narrow end, you can create a PAT that only has a single scope to a single base in Airtable. On the deep end, however, you could have a "master" token that has access to a workspace with all available scopes included.

Find/create PATs

  1. With Airtable open, click on your account in the upper right corner of the screen. Here you'll see a dropdown menu appear. Click the Developer hub option. Or if you are currently signed into Airtable, you can click here to access the developer hub.
     

  2. This will bring you to the Personal Access Tokens page of the hub. From here you'll click the blue + Create new token option near the top right portion of the screen.

  3. This will open configuration options for the PAT that you are creating. 

  4. First name the PAT, then choose the scopes you'd like this PAT to have access to. More information on which scopes we currently offer can be found here.
     

  5. Finally, choose what level of access this PAT will have. Options include choosing a single base, multiple bases (even bases from different workspaces), all of the current and future bases in a workspace you own, or even all of the bases from any workspace that you own including bases/workspace added in the future.
     

Note

Only admins can choose the option to add the Airtable enterprise. This allows admins special access to also include workspaces and bases added to their organization over time.

Modify PATs

  1. From the developer hub scroll to or search for the name of the PAT that you would like to modify. Then, click that token's name.
     

  2. Next, modify the name, scopes, or access for the PAT. Note that you can add or remove scopes and access.
     

  3. Once you are satisfied with the changes be sure to click Save changes.

Regenerate or delete PATs

  1. From the developer hub scroll to or search for the name of the PAT that you would like to modify. Then, click the three-dot spillover to the far right side of that PAT.

  2. From here, click the option you need to use.
     

  3. Regenerating a token will cause a warning message to appear. Remember that any services currently using this token will need to be updated with the new token that is generated.

  4. Deleting a token will also cause a warning message to appear. Any services currently using this token to access data in Airtable will no longer be able to after you press Delete.

API key deprecation

On January 18th, 2023, we began the deprecation period of user API keys. That period has now ended. Since this was a major change to the Airtable API, the deprecation period lasted for 12 months and ended on Feb 1, 2024. 

FAQs

What can my personal access tokens access?

Unlike legacy API keys, which have the same access as your Airtable account, you can limit and configure the access of your personal access tokens. You can do this by selecting the scopes (what endpoints the token can use) and access/resources (which bases and workspaces the token can access) when creating or updating a token. 

Regardless of the scopes and access a user selects for their token, the token will only be able to perform actions that the user creating it is allowed to do. For example, to create a new field in a base via the API, the user must be a Creator collaborator in the base and the token must have the schema.bases:write scope and the base added as a resource. 

For more information about how scopes and access work, see the Authentication developer reference. For more information about configuring your token's access, refer to the personal access tokens guide.


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