Build the App

A spreadsheet answers the person who asked. An app answers everyone who is curious — including the half of the original question no table can settle: how close to your coast does an octopus live? This step turns octopus_atlas into a published map with a field for your own coordinates. Step 6 of the Getting Started arc.

Two ways to do it — the Kai tab below is the whole path here. Building an app by hand is its own topic with its own section; the second tab says where to go for it.

What you need

• The table octopus_atlas in Storage, from Transform Data — or fresher, from the flow that now rebuilds it on a schedule.

What a data app is

A data app is a small web application that runs inside Keboola and reads your Storage tables — a map, a dashboard, an explorer — with its own URL you can send to anyone you choose to share it with. Like everything else in this guide it is a component: it can sit in a flow, and the Apps section covers it in full.

Set it up

Do it with Kai

Describing an app is a one-sentence job, and the Apps section has Kai wired in as the primary way to build one (Build your first app with Kai).

1. Open Apps in the navigation and click + Create App. You land on the Build web apps from your Keboola data screen with a prompt field.

2. Describe the app:

   Build a data app from out.c-octopus-atlas.octopus_atlas: a world map of all 10,000 octopus
   sightings colored by depth_zone, with sidebar filters for basin and display_name. Add two
   number inputs for my latitude and longitude, and show the nearest recorded sighting to that
   point — its display_name, distance in kilometers, depth_m and year.

3. Kai explores the table, then asks before it builds — a Confirmation required card with Approve / Decline / Always allow. Approve, and watch the split-screen builder: Preview on one side, Code on the other, updating as it works.

4. When the draft looks right, click Publish to Production. The app deploys, its status turns Active, and Kai hands you the app URL and a password — the default authentication is Basic (Password), so the map is not public until you decide who gets the link and the password.

5. Click Open App, type your coordinates, and the arc’s question stops being rhetorical. Here it is answering for Prague — sped up two times:

Check: the map shows sightings on every continent’s coastline; filtering by basin matches the counts Kai gave you in step 5 — the North Atlantic is the crowded one — and the nearest-sighting panel updates when you change the coordinates. If the app came out different, tell Kai what to change in the same chat — Make changes — and publish again; the draft is editable until you like it.

Do it yourself

Building an app by hand means a Git repository and your own Streamlit or Python/JS code — a real development workflow, not a form. It has its own pages: create an app manually for the UI flow, and Build locally for the repo-based workflow. Finish the arc with the Kai tab first; come back when the app you want is one the description field cannot hold.

If it goes wrong

• There is no Apps section in the navigation. Not every project has data apps enabled; see What are apps for availability, or ask your organization admin.
• The app builds but the map is empty. The app is reading the wrong table — tell Kai the full table ID, out.c-octopus-atlas.octopus_atlas, in the chat and republish.
• The nearest-sighting answer looks wrong. Coordinates are easy to swap: latitude first (positive = north), longitude second (positive = east). A minus sign on the wrong one puts you in a different hemisphere — and the nearest octopus in a different ocean.

Going further

• Publish and share — authentication options beyond the default password, and who can reach the URL.
• Build locally — the Git-based workflow once an app outgrows its first description.

Next: Where to go next →