An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data https://datasette.io
  • Python 79.4%
  • JavaScript 11.4%
  • HTML 6.2%
  • CSS 2.7%
  • Shell 0.1%
Find a file
Alex Garcia 4ebec0b1ea Give startup's ~20 orphan spans somewhere to belong
invoke_startup() runs before any request exists, so nothing it does has an
ambient span to nest under. Measured on a fresh instance: 19 distinct traces,
19 of them single- or few-span roots - the register_* hook dispatches, the
internal catalog's db.query reads and its db.write.* catalog writes. In a
trace UI that is nineteen pieces of noise sitting next to every real trace,
which for an operator opening Jaeger for the first time is the difference
between "this works" and "this is unusable".

Bracketing the whole method body in one datasette.startup span takes that to
1. This is not a propagation fix - ticket 04's context propagation was already
correct, it simply had nothing to propagate. The bulk of the app.py diff is
re-indentation; `git diff -w` shows the real change (plus one line-length
rewrap black applied to the StartupError raise).

register_output_renderer and asgi_wrapper stay orphans deliberately: both are
dispatched from Datasette.__init__ / .app(), before invoke_startup() exists to
be called, and wrapping them would mean holding a span open across object
construction in library code that may never serve a request.

Suppressing instrumentation during warm-up was rejected as an alternative: a
slow prepare_connection runs on every connection, not just at startup, and is
exactly what tracing should reveal.

Also corrects the stale write-thread warm-up comment in database.py. It is
still a root, but for a reason worth stating precisely: a raw
threading.Thread does not inherit the starting thread's context, so the
datasette.startup span current on the event loop does not reach it. Read
connections do warm up under copy_context() and nest correctly.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-01 16:24:35 -07:00
.github check-latest: true, add 3.15 to test matrix, to test RCs (#2895) 2026-09-01 13:37:15 -07:00
datasette Give startup's ~20 orphan spans somewhere to belong 2026-09-01 16:24:35 -07:00
demos Fixed an unnecessary f-string 2024-02-04 10:15:21 -08:00
docs Release 1.0a38 2026-08-06 11:20:25 -07:00
tests Give startup's ~20 orphan spans somewhere to belong 2026-09-01 16:24:35 -07:00
.coveragerc Configure code coverage, refs #841, #843 2020-06-13 13:48:23 -07:00
.dockerignore Build Dockerfile with SpatiaLite 5, refs #1249 2021-03-26 21:27:40 -07:00
.git-blame-ignore-revs Ignore Black commits in git blame, refs #1716 2022-04-22 14:58:46 -07:00
.gitattributes New explicit versioning mechanism 2020-10-28 20:38:15 -07:00
.gitignore Ignore ignored/ directory 2026-06-25 21:20:29 -07:00
.isort.cfg Used isort to re-order my imports 2018-05-14 00:04:23 -03:00
.prettierrc .prettierrc, refs #1166 2020-12-31 13:25:44 -08:00
.readthedocs.yaml dependency-groups and uv (#2611) 2025-12-11 17:32:58 -08:00
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md Add code of conduct again 2022-03-15 08:38:42 -07:00
codecov.yml codecov should not be blocking 2020-07-02 21:29:32 -07:00
Dockerfile Upgrade Docker images to Python 3.11, closes #1853 2022-10-25 12:04:53 -07:00
Justfile Add Prettier check to lint recipe (#2821) 2026-07-03 09:50:35 -07:00
LICENSE Initial commit 2017-10-22 17:39:03 -07:00
MANIFEST.in Include LICENSE in sdist (#1043) 2020-10-23 13:54:34 -07:00
package-lock.json Bump rollup from 3.29.5 to 3.30.0 (#2651) 2026-03-30 10:54:48 -07:00
package.json Bump rollup from 3.29.5 to 3.30.0 (#2651) 2026-03-30 10:54:48 -07:00
pyproject.toml Add opentelemetry-api dependency and datasette/telemetry.py scaffolding 2026-09-01 16:24:15 -07:00
pytest.ini Initial Playwright setup plus first test 2026-06-14 16:39:55 -07:00
README.md Replace Glitch with Codespaces, closes #2488 2025-05-28 19:17:22 -07:00
ruff.toml Upgrade to ruff>=0.16.0 (#2857) 2026-07-25 15:47:08 -07:00
setup.cfg Switch to ruff and fix all lint errors, refs #2630 2026-01-23 20:43:16 -08:00
test-in-pyodide-with-shot-scraper.sh Test against pyodide/v314.0.0 2026-06-22 10:11:56 -07:00

Datasette

PyPI Changelog Python 3.x Tests Documentation Status License docker: datasette discord

An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data

Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape or size and publish that as an interactive, explorable 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.

Explore a demo, watch a video about the project or try it out on GitHub Codespaces.

Want to stay up-to-date with the project? Subscribe to the Datasette newsletter for tips, tricks and news on what's new in the Datasette ecosystem.

Installation

If you are on a Mac, Homebrew is the easiest way to install Datasette:

brew install datasette

You can also install it using pip or pipx:

pip install datasette

Datasette requires Python 3.8 or higher. We also have detailed installation instructions covering other options such as Docker.

Basic usage

datasette serve path/to/database.db

This will start a web server on port 8001 - visit http://localhost:8001/ to access the web interface.

serve is the default subcommand, you can omit it if you like.

Use Chrome on OS X? You can run datasette against your browser history like so:

 datasette ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/History --nolock

Now visiting http://localhost:8001/History/downloads will show you a web interface to browse your downloads data:

Downloads table rendered by datasette

metadata.json

If you want to include licensing and source information in the generated datasette website you can do so using a JSON file that looks something like this:

{
    "title": "Five Thirty Eight",
    "license": "CC Attribution 4.0 License",
    "license_url": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "source": "fivethirtyeight/data on GitHub",
    "source_url": "https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data"
}

Save this in metadata.json and run Datasette like so:

datasette serve fivethirtyeight.db -m metadata.json

The license and source information will be displayed on the index page and in the footer. They will also be included in the JSON produced by the API.

datasette publish

If you have Heroku or Google Cloud Run configured, Datasette can deploy one or more SQLite databases to the internet with a single command:

datasette publish heroku database.db

Or:

datasette publish cloudrun database.db

This will create a docker image containing both the datasette application and the specified SQLite database files. It will then deploy that image to Heroku or Cloud Run and give you a URL to access the resulting website and API.

See Publishing data in the documentation for more details.

Datasette Lite

Datasette Lite is Datasette packaged using WebAssembly so that it runs entirely in your browser, no Python web application server required. Read more about that in the Datasette Lite documentation.