Simon Willison’s Weblog

healthkit-to-sqlite. Ever since I got an Apple Watch I’ve been itching to get my hands on the step tracking and health data that it’s been collecting for me. I know it’s there in a SQLite database on my wrist, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it! A few days ago I stumbled across the “Export Health Data” button in the iOS Health app, and it turns out it creates a zip file containing XML with a full dump of the data collected by Apple Health. healthkit-to-sqlite is the tool I’ve built that can read that export and use it to create a SQLite database ready to be queried and explored with Datasette. It’s a pretty basic implementation but it’s already giving me access to over 3 million rows of data. Lots of potential here for interesting work with personal analytics.

# 22nd July 2019, 3:34 am / dogsheep, health, datasette, sqlite

Unlocking the Department of State’s foreign military training data for good this time (via) I’m so excited about this: Security Force Monitor used Datasette to publish a 200,000 row database of training engagements between the US military and foreign military units, based on their own massive efforts to clean up the official data (from thousands of PDF files). This is pretty much my dream use-case for Datasette, and their future goals are inspiring: “Our hope is that when the next report arrives in a short few months, we will be able to turn it into machine readable data and pass it around the sector in minutes, rather than months.”

# 20th July 2019, 4:42 am / datasette

datasette-cors (via) My other Datasette ASGI plugin: this one wraps my asgi-cors project and lets you configure CORS access from a list of domains (or a set of domain wildcards) so you can make JavaScript calls to a Datasette instance from a specific set of other hosts.

# 8th July 2019, 4:30 am / projects, asgi, datasette, cors

datasette-auth-github (via) My first big ASGI plugin for Datasette: datasette-auth-github adds the ability to require users to authenticate against the GitHub OAuth API. You can whitelist specific users, or you can restrict access to members of specific GitHub organizations or teams. While it’s structured as a Datasette plugin it also includes ASGI middleware which can be applied to any ASGI application.

# 8th July 2019, 4:28 am / asgi, oauth, datasette, projects, github

Datasette 0.29 (via) I shipped Datasette 0.29! • ASGI all the way down! Plus a new asgi_wrapper plugin hook letting plugins do all kinds of powerful new things • New mechanism for secret plugin configuration options • Facet by date • ?_through= for joins through m2m tables. Much more.

# 8th July 2019, 4:26 am / projects, datasette

db-to-sqlite 1.0 release. I’ve released version 1.0 of my db-to-sqlite tool, which lets you create a SQLite database copy of any database supported by SQLAlchemy (I’ve tested it against MySQL and PostgreSQL). The tool has a bunch of new features: you can use --redact to redact specific columns, specify --table multiple times to copy a subset of tables, and the --all option now efficiently adds all foreign keys at the end of the import. The project now has unit tests which run against MySQL and PostgreSQL in Travis CI. Also included in the README: a shell one-liner for creating a local SQLite copy of a remote Heroku Postgres database based on extracting the connection string from a Heroku config environment variable.

# 1st July 2019, 1:35 am / projects, datasette, sqlite, mysql, postgresql, heroku