Unlock the Power of Notion: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Custom Application

Getting Started with Notion

To begin, sign up for a Notion account and set up a team account (or personal account, if preferred). Enter your team’s workspace details and skip the invitation step for now. Notice the pre-set workspaces in the left sidebar, including To-Do, Roadmap, Engineering Wiki, Docs, and Meeting Notes.

Creating Pages, Calendars, and Databases

Let’s create a new page on the Notion dashboard. We’ll call it “Bootcamp” and use it to store information about courses and students. Next, create a calendar database by adding a new page, typing “Bootcamp,” and selecting Calendar from the list of databases. This will display a calendar view where you can enter data.

Building a Mailing List

We want to collect names and emails from new students and store them in a mailing list. Create a new workspace by clicking + Add a Page, title it “Bootcamp Mailing List,” and select Table under Database. Set up your table to accept a Name text field in the first column and an Email field in the second column.

Setting Up Access Tokens for the Notion API

To connect to the Notion API, we need to set up an integration and generate an access token. Head to the Notion API docs page, click My integrations, and create a new integration. Give it a name, submit, and copy the internal integration token.

Connecting to the Notion Client

Now that we have our workspace, database, and integrations set up, let’s create the backend server for our student dashboard application. In your terminal, create a new Node.js project, install the Notion API SDK, and create a .env file with your internal integration token, database ID, and mailing list ID.

npm init -y
npm install @notionhq/client
touch.env

Finding Your Database ID

Head to your workspace, copy the alphanumeric characters in your URL between notion.so/ and ?, and add it to your .env file as NOTIONDATABASEID. Repeat this process for the Bootcamp Mailing List workspace.

NOTIONDATABASEID=your_database_id
MAILINGLISTID=your_mailing_list_id

Connecting to the Notion SDK

Set up your project’s file structure, and in your services directory, paste the code for connecting to the Notion SDK.

import { Client } from '@notionhq/client';

const notion = new Client({
  auth: process.env.NOTIONDATABASEID,
});

export default notion;

Next, set up your models directory with code for writing to and reading from your Notion database service.

Setting Up Controllers and Routes

Create controllers for grabbing course details and adding users to the mailing list. Then, set up routes for GET and POST requests using Fastify.

import Fastify from 'fastify';

const app = Fastify();

app.get('/courses', async (request, reply) => {
  // Get course details
});

app.post('/mailing-list', async (request, reply) => {
  // Add user to mailing list
});

app.listen(5000, (err, address) => {
  if (err) throw err;
  console.log(`Server listening on ${address}`);
});

Testing Your Application

Use the REST Client extension in VS Code to test your routes and endpoints. Make a GET request to localhost:5000 to retrieve course information, and make a POST request to add a new user to the Bootcamp Mailing List.

What’s Next?

Our server-side code is now complete and functional! We’ve explored the Notion API by building the backend of an application that can store and retrieve data. You can clone this project from GitHub or continue building upon it to create more features.

Monitoring Your Application’s Performance

As you add new JavaScript libraries and dependencies to your app, ensure you have visibility into any issues that may arise. Monitor your application’s performance to identify and fix errors quickly.

• Use a monitoring tool to track performance metrics and identify bottlenecks.
• Set up error tracking to catch and debug issues.
• Optimize your application for better performance and reliability.