Simon Willison’s Weblog

Datasette Cloud and the Datasette 1.0 alphas. I sent out the Datasette Newsletter for the first time in quite a while, with updates on Datasette Cloud, the Datasette 1.0 alphas, a note about the security vulnerability in those alphas and a summary of some of my research into combining LLMs with Datasette. # 22nd August 2023, 7:56 pm

Datasette 1.0 alpha series leaks names of databases and tables to unauthenticated users. I found and fixed a security vulnerability in the Datasette 1.0 alpha series, described in this GitHub security advisory.

The vulnerability allowed unauthenticated users to see the names of the databases and tables in an otherwise private Datasette instance—though not the actual table contents.

The fix is now shipped in Datasette 1.0a4.

The vulnerability affected Datasette Cloud as well, but thankfully I was able to analyze the access logs and confirm that no unauthenticated requests had been made against any of the affected endpoints. # 22nd August 2023, 5:44 pm

Introducing datasette-write-ui: a Datasette plugin for editing, inserting, and deleting rows. Alex García is working with me on Datasette Cloud for the next few months, graciously sponsored by Fly. We will be working in public, releasing open source code and documenting how to build a multi-tenant SaaS product using Fly Machines.

Alex’s first project is datasette-write-ui, a plugin that finally lets you directly edit data stored inside Datasette. Alex wrote about the plugin on our new Datasette Cloud blog. # 16th August 2023, 1:48 am

Welcome to Datasette Cloud. We launched the Datasette Cloud blog today! The SaaS hosted version of Datasette is ready to start onboarding more users—this post describes what it can do so far and hints at what’s planned to come next. # 16th August 2023, 1:46 am

Dependency Management Data (via) This is a really neat CLI tool by Jamie Tanna, built using Go and SQLite but with a feature that embeds a Datasette instance (literally shelling out to start the process running from within the Go application) to provide an interface for browsing the resulting database.

It addresses the challenge of keeping track of the dependencies used across an organization, by gathering them into a SQLite database from a variety of different sources—currently Dependabot, Renovate and some custom AWS tooling.

The “Example” page links to a live Datasette instance and includes video demos of the tool in action. # 11th August 2023, 3:54 pm

Datasette 1.0a3. A new Datasette alpha release. This one previews the new default JSON API design that’s coming in 1.0—the single most significant change in the 1.0 milestone, since I plan to keep that API stable for many years to come. # 9th August 2023, 8:49 pm

Digitizing 55,000 pages of civic meetings (via) Philip James has been building public, searchable archives of city council meetings for various cities—Oakland and Alamedia so far—using my s3-ocr script to run Textract OCR against the PDFs of the minutes, and deploying them to Fly using Datasette. This is a really cool project, and very much the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to support with the tools I’ve been building. # 22nd August 2022, 4:26 pm

The Datasette Newsletter: Datasette Lite, Datasette Tutorials, Datasette Cloud. It’s been quite a while since I’ve sent one of these out now—hoping to get this on to a more regular schedule. # 19th August 2022, 1:20 am

datasette on Open Source Insights (via) Open Source Insights is "an experimental service developed and hosted by Google to help developers better understand the structure, security, and construction of open source software packages". It calculates scores for packages using various automated heuristics. A JSON version of the resulting score card can be accessed using https://deps.dev/_/s/pypi/p/{package_name}/v/ # 11th August 2022, 1:06 am

Introducing sqlite-html: query, parse, and generate HTML in SQLite (via) Another brilliant SQLite extension module from Alex Garcia, this time written in Go. sqlite-html adds a whole family of functions to SQLite for parsing and constructing HTML strings, built on the Go goquery and cascadia libraries. Once again, Alex uses an Observable notebook to describe the new features, with embedded interactive examples that are backed by a Datasette instance running in Fly. # 3rd August 2022, 5:31 pm

Everything new in Datasette since January, plus Django SQL Dashboard. I sent out the first Datasette newsletter since late January this year, covering everything that’s new in Datasette and sqlite-utils this year and introducing Django SQL Dashboard. # 10th August 2021, 1:28 am

Stanford School Enrollment Project (via) This is Project Pelican: I’ve been working with the Big Local News team at Stanford helping bundle up and release the data they’ve been collecting on school enrollment statistics around the USA. This Datasette instance has data from 33 states for every year since 2015—3.3m rows total. Be sure to check out the accompanying documentation! # 8th August 2021, 12:23 am

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. # 21st August 2020, 11:15 pm

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. # 9th August 2020, 4:57 pm

Slides, notes and links from my Datasette talk at PyBay (via) I presented a session about Datasette at the PyBay conference in San Francisco this morning. I talked about the project itself and demonstrated ways of creating and publishing databases using csvs-to-sqlite, Datasette Publish and my new sqlite-utils library. # 19th August 2018, 11:23 pm