Airplane concepts

Airplane is a platform for engineers to quickly build high-quality internal tools.

Tasks are functions that anyone on your team can execute. Tasks can be built with SQL queries, REST or GraphQL API calls, and code (TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, or Shell). Users can execute tasks through a simple Airplane-generated UI, complete with rich components and validation.

Tasks can represent long-running, multi-step operations using the workflow runtime, which enables you to write orchestration logic as code.

Tasks take in parameters, and produce outputs. While executing, tasks can prompt for additional inputs and display richly-formatted information. Tasks support granular permissions for who can execute, request, or even view. Tasks can run on Airplane-hosted infrastructure or self-hosted infrastructure.

Views allow you to create custom UIs. Views are built in React and TypeScript/JavaScript and can make use of Airplane's component library to allow rapidly building high-quality interfaces. Views can execute tasks to pull data and/or make changes to data.

Resources are Airplane's main way of configuring integrations with existing systems like databases and APIs. Creating a resource configures how to e.g. connect to a database, and users can use resources by attaching them to tasks. Certain common operations can be performed from tasks via Airplane's built-in tasks.

Airplane supports standard, best-practices around role-based access control. Users can belong to groups, and both users/groups can be assigned permissions to tasks and views. We recommend you grant permissions to groups rather than users, so that as new users join your team you simply have to add them to a group to grant permissions.

In this series of getting started guides, we'll walk through building with the major components of Airplane, including tasks and views.

First, let's build a relatively simple task using just SQL.