Skip to main content

My employer requires a strict technical control to ensure that employees can only check in from their authorized workstation. The idea is to automatically capture the user’s public IP address at the time of check-in and compare it against a whitelist of IP addresses stored in Airtable.

The key constraint is that the solution must remain 100% Airtable-based: forms, automations, scripting, with no external front-end, middleware, or proxy server (e.g. Netlify, Vercel, etc.).

However, in our tests, Airtable scripts always return the IP address of Airtable’s servers (AWS), not the end user’s IP. We would like to know if there is any native Airtable method or internal configuration that would allow us to capture the real client IP address directly within Airtable.

You may want to open a support ticket with Airtable directly to get a conclusive answer 

​@Nishikage 

There is no way to do that with Airtable.

To do what you would like, you would need to switch to Apple’s FileMaker, which is a much more advanced, enterprise-level, app-based database program.

I was one of the top Certified FileMaker Developers in the USA for nearly 30 years before becoming an Expert Airtable Consultant in 2018, so if you need me to refer you to some of the country’s best FileMaker developers who can get you up & running with FileMaker, feel free to contact me through my website: ScottWorld - Airtable and FileMaker Consultants

Alternatively:

You said that you can’t use 3rd-party apps, but if you can figure out a way to do so, you can capture IP addresses by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable, and then extract & process those IP addresses by using Make’s integrations for Fillout combined with Make’s integrations for Airtable.

Fillout lets your users BOTH create new Airtable records AND update existing Airtable records through a form, so Fillout could be a front-end for much of what you’d like to do in Airtable.

You can even create a login page for your form, which will give you these additional security options:

  1. You can restrict the logins by SSO.
  2. You can restrict the logins by email domain.
  3. You can restrict the logins by password.
  4. You can restrict logins based on a pre-approved list of email addresses that you have stored in your Airtable base.
  5. You can verify & confirm that the user is typing in a valid email address.

ALSO:

There might be a 3rd-party portal that captures IP addresses. 

The most popular portals that are currently available for Airtable are: Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide.

I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.

Hope this helps!

If you have a budget and you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with this or anything else that is Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

I got around this by using a prefilled form linked through a button, then I pulled the IP from the form submission using a script triggered by an automation.

Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement