Simon Willison’s Weblog

llm-claude-3. I built a new plugin for LLM—my command-line tool and Python library for interacting with Large Language Models—which adds support for the new Claude 3 models from Anthropic. # 4th March 2024, 6:46 pm

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

Trogon (via) The latest project from the Textualize/Rich crew, Trogon provides a Python decorator—@tui—which, when applied to a Click CLI application, adds a new interactive TUI mode which introspects the available subcommands and their options and creates a full Text User Interface—with keyboard and mouse support—for assembling invocations of those various commands.

I just shipped sqlite-utils 3.32 with support for this—it uses an optional dependency, so you’ll need to run “sqlite-utils install trogon” and then “sqlite-utils tui” to try it out. # 21st May 2023, 9:39 pm

click-app. While working on sqlite-generate today I built a cookiecutter template for building the skeleton for Click command-line utilities. It’s based on datasette-plugin so it automatically sets up GitHub Actions for running tests and deploying packages to PyPI. # 23rd June 2020, 2:21 am

Datasette 0.31. Released today: this version adds compatibility with Python 3.8 and breaks compatibility with Python 3.5. Since Glitch support Python 3.7.3 now I decided I could finally give up on 3.5. This means Datasette can use f-strings now, but more importantly it opens up the opportunity to start taking advantage of Starlette, which makes all kinds of interesting new ASGI-based plugins much easier to build. # 12th November 2019, 6:11 am

json-flatten. A little Python library I wrote that attempts to flatten a JSON object into a set of key/value pairs suitable for transmitting in a query string or using to construct an HTML form. I first wrote this back in 2015 as a Gist—I’ve reconstructed the Gist commit history in a new repository and shipped it to PyPI. # 22nd June 2019, 4:51 am

World Government Data. Launched last week, this is the Guardian’s meta-search engine for searching and browsing through data from four different government data sites (with more sites planned). Under the hood it’s Django, Solr, Haystack and the Scrapy crawling library. The application was built by Ben Firshman during an internship over Christmas. # 27th January 2010, 12:27 pm

countdown_to_newyear.py. A quick Python / OS X script I knocked up last night to count in the new year (using the OS X “say” command). # 1st January 2010, 4:24 pm

Investigate your MP’s expenses. Launched today, this is the project that has been keeping me ultra-busy for the past week—we’re crowdsourcing the analysis of the 700,000+ scanned MP expenses documents released this morning. It’s the Guardian’s first live Django-powered application, and also the first time we’ve hosted something on EC2. # 18th June 2009, 11:16 pm

optfunc. Command line parsing libraries in Python such as optparse frustrate me because I can never remember how to use them without consulting the manual. optfunc is a new experimental interface to optparse which works by introspecting a function definition (including its arguments and their default values) and using that to construct a command line argument parser. Feedback and suggestions welcome! # 28th May 2009, 7:38 pm

geocoders. A fifteen minute project extracted from something else I’m working on—an ultra simple Python API for geocoding a single string against Google, Yahoo! Placemaker, GeoNames and (thanks to Jacob) Yahoo! Geo’s web services. # 27th May 2009, 10:02 am

djangopeople.net on GitHub. I’ve released the source code for Django People, the geographical community site developed last year by myself and Natalie Downe (it hasn’t otherwise been touched since April last year, so it needs porting to Django 1.1). If you want a new feature on the site, implement it and I’ll see about merging it in. # 4th May 2009, 6:12 pm

backup_to_s3.py. I wrote Yet Another S3 backup script today. It’s a thin wrapper about boto that doesn’t do anything particularly impressive, but it fits my brain. # 21st September 2008, 6:51 pm

django-html. A small project I’m working on to make Django behave better with regards to HTML v.s. XHTML. # 9th September 2008, 11:59 pm

jsontime. Nat and I threw this together this morning—it runs on Google App Engine and exposes Python’s pytz timezone library over JSONP. # 21st June 2008, 7:07 pm