Accessing the metadata API

[Taylor_Savage]

Hi everyone,

As part of our ongoing effort to make Airtable more and more extensible, we’re beginning to expand access to the Metadata API.

The metadata API gives you read-only access to a list of a user’s bases, as well as the specific schema of each base - things like what tables exist, what fields exist on those tables, etc.

Usage of this API currently requires a unique developer token, in addition to the user’s API key for whom you are looking to pull the metadata. You can view the metadata API documentation here, and request a developer token here.

We are considering in the longer-term simply rolling the metadata API functionality into the main Airtable API - this would require some deeper underlying structural changes, however, hence in the short-term we are bridging the gap by issuing individual tokens.

As always, we’re eager to get your feedback on what you’re looking to do with this and all Airtable API’s. The metadata API contains some known gaps - most obviously, that it is read-only; we’re working to prioritize which additional capabilities to support in the API, and your feedback and use-cases here are crucial inputs.

Thanks!
The Airtable Platform Team

[Ghalib_Suleiman]

@Taylor_Savage This is great; thank you! Do you know how long it takes to grant developer tokens to this? We’ve submitted our access request days ago and it’s been complete silence on Airtable’s end…

[Taylor_Savage]

Apologies for the delay - we’ve had a flood of requests come in so have been processing a backlog. Should be imminent.

[Ghalib_Suleiman]

@Taylor_Savage Thank you so very kindly for the prompt response! [Edit: we’re sorted after all. Thank you!!]

[Xavi_Valdes]

Hello!

It would be great if we could access to field metadata too. For example if we need to access to the options in a “singleSelect” type field.

There is an endpoint that is: “https://api.airtable.com/v0/meta/bases/BaseId/tables/TableId/fields” (documentation), but only accepts POST to create new fields, not GET to retrieve the existing ones.

Thanks!

[Saul_Pwanson]

Hi, I’m interested in using the metadata API, but the linked page (/api/meta) returns a 404. Is there a new link for it?

[Shrey_Mittal1]

@staff
Hi all. The metadata API documentation link seems to have stopped working:

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I’ve been using it to refer/use the metadata API.

Update:
Some of the API endpoints have stopped functioning as well.

[Ankit_Verma]

I am facing issues in accessing the metadata documentation as well. It looks like the page in unavailable.

[Taylor_Savage]

Hey all - we’re looking into the metadata API docs issue currently. Will update as we learn more.

[Shrey_Mittal1]

@Taylor_Savage Thanks for your response and hoping for a quick resolution to these issues.

Quick note: experiencing the issue with both docs + API endpoints.