Datasette: An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data

Annotated version of this introductory video

Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape or size, 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 and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world. It is part of a wider ecosystem of tools and 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 take a look at some other examples of Datasette in action.

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

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

28th March 2021 #

Datasette 0.56 has bug fixes and documentation improvements, plus some new documented internal APIs for plugin authors and SpatiaLite 5 bundled with the official Datasette Docker container.

18th February 2021 #

Datasette 0.55 adds support for cross-database SQL queries. You can now run datasette --crossdb one.db two.db and then run queries that join data from tables in both of those database files - see cross-database queries in the documentation for more details.

sqlite-utils 3.6 adds similar features: a db.attach(alias, filepath) Python API method and --attach alias filepath.db command-line option, both for attaching additional databases in order to execute cross-database queries.

7th February 2021 #

This new Video introduction to Datasette and sqlite-utils provides a full introduction to both Datasette and sqlite-utils in 17 minutes, including a live demo of creating a database from a CSV file and publishing it to Google Cloud Run.

3rd February 2021 #

Serving map tiles from SQLite with MBTiles and datasette-tiles. datasette-tiles is a new plugin that adds a tile server to Datasette, serving map tiles from databases that conform to the MBTiles specification. download-tiles is a tool for building these databases, and datasette-basemap is a plugin that bundles a 22MB SQLite database with OpenStreetMap tiles covering zoom levels 0-6 for the entire world.

25th January 2021 #

Datasette 0.54 is out today. Highlights include the new _internal in-memory database exposing details of connected tables, plus support for JavaScript modules in plugins and add-on scripts. More commentary on this release is available in the annotated release notes.

24th January 2021 #

Drawing shapes on a map to query a SpatiaLite database introduces the new datasette-leaflet-freedraw plugin, which adds support for drawing shapes on a map to specify a GeoJSON MultiPolygon that can be used to query SpatiaLite databases.

7th January 2021 #

APIs from CSS without JavaScript: the datasette-css-properties plugin introduces datasette-css-properties, a highly experimental plugin that can output table rows and SQL query results as CSS stylesheets defining custom properties that can then be used to customize a static HTML page.

19th December 2020 #

New on this site: a Datasette Tools directory and a search engine that covers documentation, tools, plugins, releases and more. The search engine uses Dogsheep Beta - I wrote about how that works in Building a search engine for datasette.io.

13th December 2020 #

I wrote more about how this site works in Weeknotes: datasette.io, an official project website for Datasette.

10th December 2020 #

Datasette 0.53 - datasette serve --create option, ?column__arraynotcontains= table filter, ?_header=off CSV option and updated links to reflect the new project website.

New Datasette project website - three years after the first release Datasette finally has its own website! The site includes project news, a plugin directory, use-cases and examples. The site is implemented using Datasette custom templates, and the source code is available on GitHub.

28th November 2020 #

Datasette 0.52 - --config is now --setting, new database_actions plugin hook, datasette publish cloudrun --apt-get-install option and several bug fixes.

31st October 2020 #

Datasette 0.51 - A new visual design, plugin hooks for adding navigation options, better handling of binary data, URL building utility methods and better support for running Datasette behind a proxy. Annotated release notes.

9th October 2020 #

Datasette 0.50 - New column actions menu. datasette.client object for plugins to make internal API requests. Improved documentation on deploying Datasette. Annotated release notes.