Airplane concepts
Airplane is a platform for engineers to quickly build high-quality internal tools.
Airplane is free to get started! Anyone can sign up by visiting
https://app.airplane.dev/signup.

Tasks
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.
Examples: Issue stripe refund, Customer onboarding, Fraud alerting workflow, Deploy
infrastructure.
Views
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.
Examples: Billing dashboard, Support inbox, Team inspector.
Resources
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.
Permissions
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.
Up next
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.