An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data

PyPI Changelog Python 3.x License discord mastodon: @datasette

Annotated version of this introductory video

Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape, analyze and explore it, and publish it as an interactive website and accompanying API.

Datasette is aimed at data journalists, museum curators, archivists, local governments, scientists, researchers and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world. It is part of a wider ecosystem of 42 tools and 114 plugins dedicated to making working with structured data as productive as possible.

Try a demo and explore 33,000 power plants around the world, then follow the tutorial or take a look at some other examples of Datasette in action.

Then read how to get started with Datasette, subscribe to the monthly-ish newsletter and consider signing up for office hours for an in-person conversation about the project.

New: Datasette Desktop - a macOS desktop application for easily running Datasette on your own computer!

Exploratory data analysis

Import data from CSVs, JSON, database connections and more. Datasette will automatically show you patterns in your data and help you share your findings with your colleagues.

Instant data publishing

datasette publish lets you instantly publish your data to hosting providers like Google Cloud Run, Heroku or Vercel.

Rapid prototyping

Spin up a JSON API for any data in minutes. Use it to prototype and prove your ideas without building a custom backend.

Latest news

23rd February 2023 #

Using Datasette in GitHub Codespaces is a new tutorial showing how Datasette can be run in GitHub's free Codespaces browser-based development environments, using the new datasette-codespaces plugin.

28th January 2023 #

Examples of sites built using Datasette now includes screenshots of Datasette deployments that illustrate a variety of problems that can be addressed using Datasette and its plugins.

13th January 2023 #

Semantic search answers: Q&A against documentation with GPT3 + OpenAI embeddings shows how Datasette can be used to implement semantic search and build a system for answering questions against an existing corpus of text, using two new plugins: datasette-openai and datasette-faiss, and a new tool: openai-to-sqlite.

9th January 2023 #

Datasette 0.64 is out, and includes a strong warning against running SpatiaLite in production without disabling arbitrary SQL queries, plus a new --setting default_allow_sql off setting to make it easier to do that. See Datasette 0.64, with a warning about SpatiaLite for more about this release. A new tutorial, Building a location to time zone API with SpatiaLite, describes how to safely use SpatiaLite and Datasette to build and deploy an API for looking up time zones for a latitude/longitude location.

15th December 2022 #

Datasette 1.0a2: Upserts and finely grained permissions describes the new upsert API and much improved permissions capabilities introduced in the latest Datasette 1.0a2 alpha release.

2nd December 2022 #

Datasette’s new JSON write API: The first alpha of Datasette 1.0 introduces the new write API shipped in the first of the Datasette 1.0 alpha series of releases, including detailed descriptions of two demos that show how the API can be used.

27th October 2022 #

Datasette 0.63 is out. Here are the annotated release notes.

8th September 2022 #

Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion describes the process of building and deploying a 4GB searchable SQLite database using Datasette, starting with Parquet data that was used to train the Stable Diffusion image generation model. See also Exploring 12 Million of the 2.3 Billion Images Used to Train Stable Diffusion’s Image Generator.

21st August 2022 #

Analyzing ScotRail audio announcements with Datasette—from prototype to production provides a detailed walk-through of the process of constructing an initial rapid prototype using Datasette Lite, extending it with a custom plugin and then deploying it as a full Datasette instance using GitHub Actions and Vercel.

14th August 2022 #

Datasette 0.62 introduces compatibility with Pyodide for Datasette Lite, and incorporates a number of bug fixes, plugin hook upgrades and other improvements.

31st July 2022 #

New tutorial and accompanying ten minute video: Cleaning data with sqlite-utils and Datasette.

30th June 2022 #

s3-ocr is a new tool which can run OCR (via Amazon Textract) against every PDF file in an S3 bucket and write the results to a searchable SQLite database, ready to use with Datasette. Read more about it in s3-ocr: Extract text from PDF files stored in an S3 bucket.

5th May 2022 #

Datasette Lite is a new way to run Datasette: entirely in your browser, thanks to the Pyodide project which provides a full Python environment compiled to WebAssembly. You can use it to explore any SQLite database file hosted on a CORS-enabled static hosting provider, which includes GitHub and GitHub Pages. Read more about this project in Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser.

12th April 2022 #

Datasette for geospatial analysis describes how Datasette can be used in conjunction with SpatiaLite to work with geospatial data, including details of several geospatial plugins and tools from the Datasette ecosystem.

23rd March 2022 #

Datasette 0.61 introduces two potentially backwards-incompatible changes in preparation for the forthcoming 1.0 release: hashed URL mode has been moved to a new plugin, and the way URLs are generated to tables or databases containing special characters such as . or / has changed. Datasette 0.61.1 fixes a small bug in that release. See also the annotated release notes for these two versions.

All news

Latest releases

8th March 2023

datasette 0.64.2 - An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data

  • Fixed a bug with datasette publish cloudrun where deploys all used the same Docker image tag. This was mostly inconsequential as the service is deployed as soon as the image has been pushed to the registry, but could result in the incorrect image being deployed if two different deploys for two separate services ran at exactly the same time. #2036

4th March 2023

datasette-scraper 0.5.3 - Adds website scraping abilities to Datasette.

Make the UI less daunting by hiding all tables except dss_crawl, and improving links from dss_crawl to dss_job, #51

1st March 2023

datasette-scraper 0.5.2

Fix crawl status page when dss database is not the primary database (#49)

datasette-simple-html 0.1 - Datasette SQL functions for very simple HTML operations

  • Initial implementation: html_strip_tags(text), html_escape(text) and html_unescape(text) SQL functions. #1

28th February 2023

datasette-scraper 0.5.1 - Adds website scraping abilities to Datasette.

Support installing datasette-scraper into a database with pre-existing tables (#48)

27th February 2023

datasette-app 0.2.3

  • Fixed errors launching initial application. #153

23rd February 2023

datasette-codespaces 0.1.1 - Conveniences for running Datasette on GitHub Codespaces

22nd February 2023

datasette-codespaces 0.1

  • Initial release. Ensures links work correctly when Datasette is run in Codespaces, and that the user is authenticated as root automatically. #1

9th February 2023

datasette-explain 0.1a0 - Explain SQL queries executed using Datasette

  • Initial alpha release. #1

7th February 2023

db-to-sqlite 1.5 - CLI tool for exporting tables or queries from any SQL database to a SQLite file

  • Upgraded for compatibility with SQLAlchemy 2.0. #46
  • Now documented to work with MS SQL Server. Thanks, Ryan Cheley. #37

30th January 2023

shot-scraper 1.1.1 - A command-line utility for taking automated screenshots of websites

  • Deprecated the shot-scraper multi --fail-on-error option in favor of the new --fail option. --fail-on-error will continue to work until shot-scraper 2.0 (should that ever be released), but is no longer displayed in the --help menu or documentation. #103

shot-scraper 1.1

  • New --log-console option for logging the output of calls to console.log() to standard error. #101
  • New --skip and --fail options to specify what should happen if an HTTP 4xx or 5xx error is encountered while trying to load the page. --skip will ignore the error and either exit cleanly or move on to the next screenshot (in the case of multi). --fail will cause the tool to return a non-zero exit code, useful for running in CI environments. #102

28th January 2023

datasette-matomo 0.1.0 - Add Matomo Web Analytics tracking code to Datasette

Initial release of datasette-matomo.

27th January 2023

datasette-render-markdown 2.1.1 - Datasette plugin for rendering Markdown

  • Fixed a bug where [Links containing & characters](...) were rendered with the ampersand double-escaped as &. #13

datasette-youtube-embed 0.1 - Turn YouTube URLs into embedded players in Datasette

  • Initial release. Turns YouTube video URLs into embedded video players. #1

All releases