Simon Willison’s Weblog

django-simple-deploy. Eric Matthes presented a lightning talk about this project at PyCon US this morning. "Django has a deploy command now". You can run it like this:

pip install django-simple-deploy[fly_io]
# Add django_simple_deploy to INSTALLED_APPS.
python manage.py deploy --automate-all

It's plugin-based (inspired by Datasette!) and the project has stable plugins for three hosting platforms: dsd-flyio, dsd-heroku and dsd-platformsh.

Currently in development: dsd-vps - a plugin that should work with any VPS provider, using Paramiko to connect to a newly created instance and run all of the commands needed to start serving a Django application.

# 17th May 2025, 12:49 pm / django, paramiko, plugins, python, heroku, datasette, fly

datasette-enrichments-llm. Today's new alpha release is datasette-enrichments-llm, a plugin for Datasette 1.0a+ that provides an enrichment that lets you run prompts against data from one or more column and store the result in another column.

So far it's a light re-implementation of the existing datasette-enrichments-gpt plugin, now using the new llm.get_async_models() method to allow users to select any async-enabled model that has been registered by a plugin - so currently any of the models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or Mistral via their respective plugins.

Still plenty to do on this one. Next step is to integrate it with datasette-llm-usage and use it to drive a design-complete stable version of that.

# 5th December 2024, 11:46 pm / plugins, projects, releases, ai, datasette, generative-ai, llms, llm, enrichments

datasette-queries. I released the first alpha of a new plugin to replace the crusty old datasette-saved-queries. This one adds a new UI element to the top of the query results page with an expandable form for saving the query as a new canned query:

It's my first plugin to depend on LLM and datasette-llm-usage - it uses GPT-4o mini to power an optional "Suggest title and description" button, labeled with the becoming-standard ✨ sparkles emoji to indicate an LLM-powered feature.

I intend to expand this to work across multiple models as I continue to iterate on llm-datasette-usage to better support those kinds of patterns.

For the moment though each suggested title and description call costs about 250 input tokens and 50 output tokens, which against GPT-4o mini adds up to 0.0067 cents.

# 3rd December 2024, 11:59 pm / plugins, projects, releases, ai, datasette, openai, generative-ai, llms, llm

datasette-llm-usage. I released the first alpha of a Datasette plugin to help track LLM usage by other plugins, with the goal of supporting token allowances - both for things like free public apps that stop working after a daily allowance, plus free previews of AI features for paid-account-based projects such as Datasette Cloud.

It's using the usage features I added in LLM 0.19.

The alpha doesn't do much yet - it will start getting interesting once I upgrade other plugins to depend on it.

Design notes so far in issue #1.

# 2nd December 2024, 9:33 pm / plugins, projects, releases, ai, datasette, datasette-cloud, generative-ai, llms, llm

django-plugin-datasette. I did some more work on my DJP plugin mechanism for Django at the DjangoCon US sprints today. I added a new plugin hook, asgi_wrapper(), released in DJP 0.3 and inspired by the similar hook in Datasette.

The hook only works for Django apps that are served using ASGI. It allows plugins to add their own wrapping ASGI middleware around the Django app itself, which means they can do things like attach entirely separate ASGI-compatible applications outside of the regular Django request/response cycle.

Datasette is one of those ASGI-compatible applications!

django-plugin-datasette uses that new hook to configure a new URL, /-/datasette/, which serves a full Datasette instance that scans through Django’s settings.DATABASES dictionary and serves an explore interface on top of any SQLite databases it finds there.

It doesn’t support authentication yet, so this will expose your entire database contents - probably best used as a local debugging tool only.

I did borrow some code from the datasette-mask-columns plugin to ensure that the password column in the auth_user column is reliably redacted. That column contains a heavily salted hashed password so exposing it isn’t necessarily a disaster, but I like to default to keeping hashes safe.

# 26th September 2024, 9:57 pm / django, plugins, projects, sqlite, datasette, djp

datasette-checkbox. I built this fun little Datasette plugin today, inspired by a conversation I had in Datasette Office Hours.

If a user has the update-row permission and the table they are viewing has any integer columns with names that start with is_ or should_ or has_, the plugin adds interactive checkboxes to that table which can be toggled to update the underlying rows.

This makes it easy to quickly spin up an interface that allows users to review and update boolean flags in a table.

I have ambitions for a much more advanced version of this, where users can do things like add or remove tags from rows directly in that table interface - but for the moment this is a neat starting point, and it only took an hour to build (thanks to help from Claude to build an initial prototype, chat transcript here).

# 16th August 2024, 9:28 pm / plugins, projects, datasette, claude-3-5-sonnet

Announcing our DjangoCon US 2024 Talks! I'm speaking at DjangoCon in Durham, NC in September.

My accepted talk title was How to design and implement extensible software with plugins. Here's my abstract:

Plugins offer a powerful way to extend software packages. Tools that support a plugin architecture include WordPress, Jupyter, VS Code and pytest - each of which benefits from an enormous array of plugins adding all kinds of new features and expanded capabilities.

Adding plugin support to an open source project can greatly reduce the friction involved in attracting new contributors. Users can work independently and even package and publish their work without needing to directly coordinate with the project's core maintainers. As a maintainer this means you can wake up one morning and your software grew new features without you even having to review a pull request!

There's one catch: information on how to design and implement plugin support for a project is scarce.

I now have three major open source projects that support plugins, with over 200 plugins published across those projects. I'll talk about everything I've learned along the way: when and how to use plugins, how to design plugin hooks and how to ensure your plugin authors have as good an experience as possible.

I'm going to be talking about what I've learned integrating Pluggy with Datasette, LLM and sqlite-utils. I've been looking for an excuse to turn this knowledge into a talk for ages, very excited to get to do it at DjangoCon!

# 17th July 2024, 3:20 am / django, djangocon, plugins, python, speaking, datasette, sqlite-utils, llm

datasette-python. I just released a small new plugin for Datasette to assist with debugging. It adds a python subcommand which runs a Python process in the same virtual environment as Datasette itself.

I built it initially to help debug some issues in Datasette installed via Homebrew. The Homebrew installation has its own virtual environment, and sometimes it can be useful to run commands like pip list in the same environment as Datasette itself.

Now you can do this:

brew install datasette
datasette install datasette-python
datasette python -m pip list

I built a similar plugin for LLM last year, called llm-python - it's proved useful enough that I duplicated the design for Datasette.

# 12th July 2024, 11:17 pm / plugins, projects, python, datasette

datasette-pins — a new Datasette plugin for pinning tables and queries. Alex Garcia built this plugin for Datasette Cloud, and as with almost every Datasette Cloud features we're releasing it as an open source package as well.

datasette-pins allows users with the right permission to "pin" tables, databases and queries to their homepage. It's a lightweight way to customize that homepage, especially useful as your Datasette instance grows to host dozens or even hundreds of tables.

# 9th May 2024, 6:29 pm / plugins, datasette, datasette-cloud, alex-garcia

datasette-import. A new plugin for importing data into Datasette. This is a replacement for datasette-paste, duplicating and extending its functionality. datasette-paste had grown beyond just dealing with pasted CSV/TSV/JSON data—it handles file uploads as well now—which inspired the new name.

# 6th April 2024, 10:40 pm / plugins, projects, datasette

datasette-studio. I've been thinking for a while that it might be interesting to have a version of Datasette that comes bundled with a set of useful plugins, aimed at expanding Datasette's default functionality to cover things like importing data and editing schemas.

This morning I built the very first experimental preview of what that could look like. Install it using pipx:

pipx install datasette-studio

I recommend pipx because it will ensure datasette-studio gets its own isolated environment, independent of any other Datasette installations you might have.

Now running datasette-studio instead of datasette will get you the version with the bundled plugins.

The implementation of this is fun - it's a single pyproject.toml file defining the dependencies and setting up the datasette-studio CLI hook, which is enough to provide the full set of functionality.

Is this a good idea? I don't know yet, but it's certainly an interesting initial experiment.

# 18th February 2024, 8:38 pm / cli, plugins, projects, pypi, python, datasette

datasette-plot—a new Datasette Plugin for building data visualizations. I forgot to link to this here last week: Alex Garcia released the first version of datasette-plot, a brand new Datasette visualization plugin built on top of the Observable Plot charting library. We plan to use this as the new, updated alternative to my older datasette-vega plugin.

# 31st December 2023, 5:04 am / plugins, visualization, datasette, observable, alex-garcia, observable-plot

Introducing datasette-litestream: easy replication for SQLite databases in Datasette. We use Litestream on Datasette Cloud for streaming backups of user data to S3. Alex Garcia extracted out our implementation into a standalone Datasette plugin, which bundles the Litestream Go binary (for the relevant platform) in the package you get when you run “datasette install datasette-litestream”—so now Datasette has a very robust answer to questions about SQLite disaster recovery beyond just the Datasette Cloud platform.

# 13th September 2023, 7:28 pm / plugins, sqlite, datasette, datasette-cloud, litestream, alex-garcia

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 / plugins, datasette, datasette-cloud, fly, alex-garcia

Making SQLite extensions pip install-able (via) Alex Garcia figured out how to bundle a compiled SQLite extension in a Python wheel (building different wheels for different platforms) and publish them to PyPI. This is a huge leap forward in terms of the usability of SQLite extensions, which have previously been pretty difficult to actually install and run. Alex also created Datasette plugins that depend on his packages, so you can now “datasette install datasette-sqlite-regex” (or datasette-sqlite-ulid, datasette-sqlite-fastrand, datasette-sqlite-jsonschema) to gain access to his custom SQLite extensions in your Datasette instance. It even works with “datasette publish --install” to deploy to Vercel, Fly.io and Cloud Run.

# 6th February 2023, 7:44 pm / pip, plugins, python, sqlite, datasette, alex-garcia

datasette-scraper walkthrough on YouTube (via) datasette-scraper is Colin Dellow’s new plugin that turns Datasette into a powerful web scraping tool, with a web UI based on plugin-driven customizations to the Datasette interface. It’s really impressive, and this ten minute demo shows quite how much it is capable of: it can crawl sitemaps and fetch pages, caching them (using zstandard with optional custom dictionaries for extra compression) to speed up subsequent crawls... and you can add your own plugins to extract structured data from crawled pages and save it to a separate SQLite table!

# 29th January 2023, 5:23 am / plugins, scraping, datasette, colin-dellow