CollabPortals

Connecting Your Airtable Account

How to connect your Airtable account to CollabPortals using OAuth and manage your connection.

Overview

CollabPortals connects to your Airtable account via OAuth 2.0. This is the standard, secure way for apps to access your Airtable data. You authorize CollabPortals directly through Airtable's interface, and you can revoke access at any time.

Connecting Your Account

  1. 1

    Open the Connection page

    After logging in to CollabPortals, open Connection in the admin sidebar. If you haven't connected Airtable yet, the admin sends you there on its own.

  2. 2

    Click Connect Airtable

    Click Connect to Airtable. You'll be redirected to Airtable's authorization page.

  3. 3

    Authorize access

    On Airtable's page, select which bases you want CollabPortals to access. You can grant access to all bases or choose specific ones.

  4. 4

    Return to CollabPortals

    After authorizing, you'll be redirected back to CollabPortals. Your account is now connected and you can start creating portals.

CollabPortals requests read and write access to your Airtable data. Write access is needed so portal users can create, edit, and delete records through your portals.

What Permissions Are Needed

When you authorize CollabPortals, Airtable lists the permissions on the consent screen before you approve. They are:

  • Read and write your base structures (tables, fields, views)
  • Read and write records in your bases
  • Read and write record comments
  • Read your account email (to identify your account)

CollabPortals only accesses the bases you grant permission to during the OAuth flow.

Token Refresh

You don't need to worry about token expiration. CollabPortals automatically refreshes your Airtable access token when it expires. This happens seamlessly in the background, no action required from you.

Managing Your Connection

Checking Connection Status

The Connection page shows the status of your Airtable connection. A green Connected badge means it is active and working. Underneath it, "Airtable account" shows the identifier Airtable issued for the account you connected, which is an opaque usr... string rather than a name or an email address.

Reconnecting

If your connection stops working (for example, if you revoked access from Airtable's settings), you can reconnect by:

  1. Opening Connection in the admin sidebar
  2. Clicking Reconnect
  3. Completing the OAuth flow again

Revoking Access

You can revoke CollabPortals' access to your Airtable data at any time:

  1. Go to Airtable's connected apps settings
  2. Find CollabPortals in the list
  3. Click "Revoke access"

Revoking access will immediately stop all your portals from working. Portal users will see an error when trying to access data. Reconnect to restore portal functionality.

Granting Access to Additional Bases

If you created new bases in Airtable after connecting and want to use them in CollabPortals:

  1. Reconnect your Airtable account from the Connection page
  2. During the OAuth flow, select the new bases you want to grant access to
  3. Your existing portals will continue working

Next Steps

Previous
Getting Started with CollabPortals
Next
Setting Up Your Airtable Base