Deploy Retool, the low-code productivity platform, on Northflank

As digitisation and innovation accelerate, companies need internal tools that are both powerful and easy to build to boost productivity. Retool has become a favourite amongst developers and companies that want to build custom internal apps without spending weeks on development. With its drag-and-drop interface and JavaScript integration, Retool is a low-code platform that lets teams build dashboards, admin panels and custom workflows that integrate with their existing data sources.

While the cloud version of Retool is convenient, self-hosting is a strategic choice for companies that require data security and compliance. For healthcare, finance and legal sectors, self-hosting means all data stays in your controlled environment and helps met compliance requirements like GDPR, HIPAA and SOC 2. With Northflank's Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC), companies are able to take advantage of Northflank's platform layer whilst deploying directly into their existing cloud accounts.

This article guides you through using the Northflank stack template to deploy Retool on Northflank. This includes setting up Postgres to store your Retool configuration.

Self-hosted Retool is split into the following components:

1. Database (PostgreSQL)
   • PostgreSQL is used to stores all configuration, user information, and metadata.
2. Retool Backend
   • Serves and processes the frontend, as well as orchestrating queries to your data sources. This is the web app you interact with to configure all your Retool apps and workflows.
3. Code Executor
   • Processes user-created code blocks created within Retool (JavaScript and Python is support). Being separated from other services allows isolated code execution, so others services do not get disrupted.
4. Jobs Runner
   • Handles running background and scheduled tasks.
5. Temporal
   • Temporal is an open‑source workflow orchestration system that Retool leverages for complex, multi‑step processes. It provides features like scheduling, automatic retries, and state tracking.
6. Temporal Services (temporal-ui, temporal-admin-tools)
   • temporal-ui: A web interface to observe active and completed workflows.
   • temporal-admin-tools: A set of CLI utilities for administration tasks such as managing namespaces or adjusting retention policies.
7. Retool Workflows Services
   • workflows-backend: Receives and processes requests from the code executor to process workflows.
   • workflows-worker: Polls Temporal for workflow tasks and executes blocks via the code executor.

By splitting each of these components into its own service, you gain greater control and easier scalability for your Retool deployment.

Before deploying Retool on Northflank, make sure you have completed the following:

• Sign up or log in to your Northflank account and create or select a team
• Sign up⁠ for self-hosted Retool and retrieve your license key
• Optional: If you want to deploy Retool into your existing AWS/GCP/Azure account, configure Northflank’s BYOC.

To deploy Retool we're going to use a Northflank Stack Template. These are curated infrastructure-as-code templates which allow you to “one-click” deploy software stacks. Our Retool stack template has been carefully designed to successfully deploy all of Retool's required services, including both Temporal and PostgreSQL.

1. Sign up or log in to your Northflank account
2. Navigate to our Retool stack template
3. Click deploy Retool now
4. Feel free to customise your project name, colour and region
5. At the bottom of the page, expand Advanced configuration and add your Retool license key. Northflank will automatically generate values for your JWT_SECRET and ENCRYPTION_KEY, or you can provide your own.
6. Click Deploy stack to save and run the Retool template
7. Once the template has finished, select the api service
8. Open the code.run domain under Ports & DNS to log in to your Retool service

You should now be able to access your self-hosted Retool!

Now that you have your Retool instance running, we'll look at some of Northflank’s features that can help you get the most out of your deployment, as well as some Retool configuration options.

Currently your Retool instance is accessible via a code.run domain. Northflank allows you to configure custom domains for your services, to make your deployments accessible on your domains and subdomains.

Northflank provides easy access to container logs and metrics via both the web platform and the CLI tool. You're able to access both real-time and historic data for all services, jobs and addons, enabling you to easy monitor services as well as debug issues.

In the Retool stack template, we've purposely not made Temporal UI accessible publicly as it doesn't come with authentication out-of-the-box. Northflank offers multiple features that you could use to securely access it:

• IP Policies enables you to limit access to specific IP addresses and ranges
• Basic Auth requires users to enter a username and password
• SSO Provider require users to authenticate via your SSO provider (enterprise only)
• Northflank CLI using the northflank forward command to forward access to the service locally

Retool Database is a Retool feature which enables you to store data locally for your apps use. Retool exposes this data via a spreadsheet-like interface for you to view and updated. To configure Retool Database, you’ll need to:

• Navigate to {your-domain}/resources?setupRetoolDB=1 , where {your-domain} is your domain configured for the api service
• Configure Retool Database to use the administrator credentials from your retool-database PostgreSQL addon. You can find this by navigating to your project → Addons → retool-database → Connection details. The fields should be configured as follows (use the values from the connection details, not the keys):

• Click Test connection
• Once the connection is tested successfully, press Update configuration
• You’ll be taken to the spreadsheet-like view what you can create new tables to store data in

Retool offers multiple single sign-on integrations for you to make integration into your organisation easier. As of Retool v3.16, these can all be managed via the Retool web interface, rather than the previous method of configuring environment variables.

Retool provide a detailed guide on migrating from Retool Cloud to self-hosted Retool.