An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data https://datasette.io
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Alex Garcia 8d32eac895 Name every span and attribute once, in a registry the docs are built from
The span and attribute names were string literals spread across four call
sites in database.py and one in app.py, with a hand-written reference page
that would have been true only on the day it was written. That drift is not
hypothetical: an earlier iteration of this work carried a README asserting
parameter values were never recorded for two branches after that had stopped
being true.

datasette/telemetry_registry.py now holds each name once, with its
documentation. Attribute and SpanName subclass str, so a registry entry *is*
the string OpenTelemetry wants - no wrapper API over the OTel calls, no
parallel structure to keep in step, and a typo becomes an ImportError rather
than a silently misnamed attribute. docs/internals.rst renders the span
reference from it via cog, and `cog --check docs/*.rst` already runs in CI,
so the reference cannot drift from the definitions.

Nothing changes on the wire: the emitted span names and attribute keys are
byte-identical before and after, verified by diffing a dump of both.

tests/test_telemetry_registry.py exercises a real workload and compares it
against the registry in both directions - emitted-but-unregistered catches
instrumentation added without documentation, registered-but-never-emitted
catches documentation that has outlived its code. Because the call sites now
take their names from the registry, neither direction can catch a rename:
move DB_NAMESPACE to "db.namespace2" and code and registry still agree while
every dashboard breaks. So the literal names are also written out in the test
and asserted against the registry and against the wire separately. That pair
is the only comparison in the file not derived from the registry itself.

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 Name every span and attribute once, in a registry the docs are built from 2026-09-01 16:24:35 -07:00
demos Fixed an unnecessary f-string 2024-02-04 10:15:21 -08:00
docs Name every span and attribute once, in a registry the docs are built from 2026-09-01 16:24:35 -07:00
tests Name every span and attribute once, in a registry the docs are built from 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.