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New API capabilities now in GA and upcoming API keys deprecation period

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Fred_Zhao
Airtable Employee
Airtable Employee

Hiya everybody,

For those I haven’t met, I’m Fred, an Engineering Manager here at Airtable.

Today our team is announcing the General Availability of many new API features to make our API Authentication more secure and reliable, as well as open up new API capabilities. These include:

Additional upcoming changes to the API experience

With that, we are now announcing the beginning of the deprecation period for API Keys in favor of the two new API Authentication methods: Personal Access Tokens for individual use and OAuth for Integrations. Both new methods have more granular control of resources and scopes, and enable both developers and end-users to extend Airtable while ensuring the highest grade of security.

As this is a major change to the Airtable API, the API Key deprecation period will last for 12 months and end on Feb 1, 2024, after which API Keys will no longer be able to access the Airtable API. Related to this, webhooks created by API Keys in enterprise bases will also expire at the end of that period. We recommend all users to migrate to Personal Access Tokens for individual use and OAuth for third-party integrations moving forward.

Why are we doing this?

Personal Access Tokens and OAuth provide a higher standard for security over API Keys, which were the predecessor that provided “all-or-nothing” access over everything that an Airtable user account could see or do. These new methods have more granular control of resources and scopes, and allow you to extend Airtable while ensuring the highest grade of security.

Who is affected by this deprecation?

Anyone using API Keys will be affected by this change. This could be you as an end-user, or some other end-user for whom you have built an existing integration upon the Airtable API.

What do I need to do?

We understand this is a big change, so we’ll be sharing more details in the coming weeks to make this transition as smooth as possible: intermediate deprecation milestones, and more actionable details. The support article on API Keys will also be updated over time, so feel free to bookmark it.

While there are no immediate actions you need to take right now as we enter this deprecation period, remember that time flies! So we recommend all users begin migrating away from API Keys.

As always, you can learn more about our APIs from our developer docs. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask here.

Fred, on behalf of the Airtable Team

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