449 items tagged “projects”
Posts about projects I have worked on.
2020
Refactoring databases with sqlite-utils extract
Yesterday I described the new sqlite-utils transform mechanism for applying SQLite table transformations that go beyond those supported by ALTER TABLE. The other new feature in sqlite-utils 2.20 builds on that capability to allow you to refactor a database table by extracting columns into separate tables. I’ve called it sqlite-utils extract.
Executing advanced ALTER TABLE operations in SQLite
SQLite’s ALTER TABLE has some significant limitations: it can’t drop columns (UPDATE: that was fixed in SQLite 3.35.0 in March 2021), it can’t alter NOT NULL status, it can’t change column types. Since I spend a lot of time with SQLite these days I’ve written some code to fix this—both from Python and as a command-line utility.
[... 689 words]Weeknotes: datasette-seaborn, fivethirtyeight-polls
This week I released Datasette 0.49 and tinkered with datasette-seaborn, dogsheep-beta and polling data from FiveThirtyEight.
[... 951 words]Datasette 0.49: The annotated release notes
Datasette 0.49 is out. Some notes on what’s new.
[... 1,234 words]Weeknotes: airtable-export, generating screenshots in GitHub Actions, Dogsheep!
This week I figured out how to populate Datasette from Airtable, wrote code to generate social media preview card page screenshots using Puppeteer, and made a big breakthrough with my Dogsheep project.
[... 1,461 words]Render Markdown tool (via) I wrote a quick JavaScript tool for rendering Markdown via the GitHub Markdown API—which includes all of their clever extensions like tables and syntax highlighting—and then stripping out some extraneous HTML to give me back the format I like using for my blog posts.
airtable-export. I wrote a command-line utility for exporting data from Airtable and dumping it to disk as YAML, JSON or newline delimited JSON files. This means you can backup an Airtable database from a GitHub Action and get a commit history of changes made to your data.
Weeknotes: California Protected Areas in Datasette
This week I built a geospatial search engine for protected areas in California, shipped datasette-graphql 1.0 and started working towards the next milestone for Datasette Cloud.
[... 1,099 words]California Protected Areas Database in Datasette (via) I built this yesterday: it’s a Datasette interface on top of the CPAD 2020 GIS database of protected areas in California maintained by GreenInfo Network. This was a useful excuse to build a GitHub Actions flow that builds a SpatiaLite database using my shapefile-to-sqlite tool, and I fixed a few bugs in my datasette-leaflet-geojson plugin as well.
Weeknotes: Rocky Beaches, Datasette 0.48, a commit history of my database
This week I helped Natalie launch Rocky Beaches, shipped Datasette 0.48 and several releases of datasette-graphql, upgraded the CSRF protection for datasette-upload-csvs and figured out how to get a commit log of changes to my blog by backing up its database to a GitHub repository.
Weeknotes: Installing Datasette with Homebrew, more GraphQL, WAL in SQLite
This week I’ve been working on making Datasette easier to install, plus wide-ranging improvements to the Datasette GraphQL plugin.
[... 1,009 words]Datasette 0.46 (via) I just released Datasette 0.46 with a security fix for an issue involving CSRF tokens on canned query pages, plus a new debugging tool, improved file downloads and a bunch of other smaller improvements.
GraphQL in Datasette with the new datasette-graphql plugin
This week I’ve mostly been building datasette-graphql, a plugin that adds GraphQL query support to Datasette.
[... 1,249 words]sqlite-utils 2.14 (via) I finally figured out porter stemming with SQLite full-text search today—it turns out it’s as easy as adding tokenize=’porter’ to the CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE statement. So I just shipped sqlite-utils 2.14 with a tokenize= option (plus the ability to insert binary file data from stdin).
Fun with binary data and SQLite
This week I’ve been mainly experimenting with binary data storage in SQLite. sqlite-utils can now insert data from binary files, and datasette-media can serve content over HTTP that originated as binary BLOBs in a database file.
[... 957 words]datasette-media 0.4. datasette-media is my Datasette plugin for serving media (e.g. images) directly from Datasette. The first version used file paths saved in a column and served the data from disk—this new version adds the ability to serve content from BLOB columns, such as those created by the new “sqlite-utils insert-files” command. It also adds configurable support for resizing images based on querystring parameters like ?w=100.
sqlite-utils 2.12 (via) I’ve been experimenting with ways of improving BLOB support in Datasette and sqlite-utils. This new version of sqlite-utils includes a “sqlite-utils insert-files” command, which can recursively crawl directories for files and add their contents to SQLite with configurable columns containing their metadata.
I was inspired by Paul Ford who has been creating multi-GB SQLite databases of images and PDFs. It turns out that when disk space is cheap this is a pretty effective way of working with interesting corpuses of documents and images.
pypi-rename. I wanted to rename a PyPI package (renaming datasette-insert-api to datasette-insert as it’s about to grow some non-API features). PyPI recommend uploading a final release under the old name which points to (and depends on) the new name. I’ve built a cookiecutter template to codify that pattern.
Weeknotes: datasette-copyable, datasette-insert-api
Two new Datasette plugins this week: datasette-copyable, helping users copy-and-paste data from Datasette into other places, and datasette-insert-api, providing a JSON API for inserting and updating data and creating tables.
[... 953 words]Weeknotes: datasette-auth-passwords, a Datasette logo and a whole lot more
All sorts of project updates this week.
[... 913 words]datasette-auth-passwords. My latest plugin: datasette-auth-passwords provides a mechanism for signing into Datasette using a username and password (which is verified in order to set a ds_actor authentication cookie). So far it only supports passwords that are hard-coded into Datasette’s configuration via environment variables, but I plan to add database-backed user accounts in the future.
Building a self-updating profile README for GitHub
GitHub quietly released a new feature at some point in the past few days: profile READMEs. Create a repository with the same name as your GitHub account (in my case that’s github.com/simonw/simonw), add a README.md to it and GitHub will render the contents at the top of your personal profile page—for me that’s github.com/simonw
Weeknotes: SBA Covid-19 PPP loans, Datasette talks, Datasette plugin upgrades
This week I’ve mainly been exploring Small Business Administration Covid-19 loans data, pitching some talks and upgrading some plugins for compatibility with Datasette 0.44+.
[... 524 words]sba-loans-covid-19-datasette (via) The treasury department released a bunch of data on the Covid-19 SBA Paycheck Protection Program Loan recipients today—I’ve loaded the most interesting data (the $150,000+ loans) into a Datasette instance.
Datasette 0.45: The annotated release notes
Datasette 0.45, out today, features magic parameters for canned queries, a log out feature, improved plugin documentation and four new plugin hooks.
[... 863 words]Weeknotes: cookiecutter templates, better plugin documentation, sqlite-generate
I spent this week spreading myself between a bunch of smaller projects, and finally getting familiar with cookiecutter. I wrote about my datasette-plugin cookiecutter template earlier in the week; here’s what else I’ve been working on.
[... 703 words]datasette-block-robots.
Another little Datasette plugin: this one adds a /robots.txt page with Disallow: / to block all indexing of a Datasette instance from respectable search engine crawlers. I built this in less than ten minutes from idea to deploy to PyPI thanks to the datasette-plugin cookiecutter template.
click-app. While working on sqlite-generate today I built a cookiecutter template for building the skeleton for Click command-line utilities. It’s based on datasette-plugin so it automatically sets up GitHub Actions for running tests and deploying packages to PyPI.
sqlite-generate (via) I wrote this tool today to generate arbitrarily large SQLite databases, for testing purposes. You tell it how many tables, columns and rows you want and it will use the Faker Python library to generate random data and populate the tables with it.
A cookiecutter template for writing Datasette plugins
Datasette’s plugin system is one of the most interesting parts of the entire project. As I explained to Matt Asay in this interview, the great thing about plugins is that Datasette can gain new functionality overnight without me even having to review a pull request. I just need to get more people to write them!
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