Plugins

Datasette’s plugin system is currently under active development. It allows additional features to be implemented as Python code (or front-end JavaScript) which can be wrapped up in a separate Python package. The underlying mechanism uses pluggy.

You can follow the development of plugins in issue #14.

Using plugins

If a plugin has been packaged for distribution using setuptools you can use the plugin by installing it alongside Datasette in the same virtual environment or Docker container.

You can also define one-off per-project plugins by saving them as plugin_name.py functions in a plugins/ folder and then passing that folder to datasette serve.

The datasette publish and datasette package commands both take an optional --install argument. You can use this one or more times to tell Datasette to pip install specific plugins as part of the process. You can use the name of a package on PyPI or any of the other valid arguments to pip install such as a URL to a .zip file:

datasette publish now mydb.db \
    --install=datasette-plugin-demos \
    --install=https://url-to-my-package.zip

Writing plugins

The easiest way to write a plugin is to create a my_plugin.py file and drop it into your plugins/ directory. Here is an example plugin, which adds a new custom SQL function called hello_world() which takes no arguments and returns the string Hello world!.

from datasette import hookimpl

@hookimpl
def prepare_connection(conn):
    conn.create_function('hello_world', 0, lambda: 'Hello world!')

If you save this in plugins/my_plugin.py you can then start Datasette like this:

datasette serve mydb.db --plugins-dir=plugins/

Now you can navigate to http://localhost:8001/mydb and run this SQL:

select hello_world();

To see the output of your plugin.

Seeing what plugins are installed

You can see a list of installed plugins by navigating to the /-/plugins page of your Datasette instance - for example: https://fivethirtyeight.datasettes.com/-/plugins

You can also use the datasette plugins command:

$ datasette plugins
[
    {
        "name": "datasette_json_html",
        "static": false,
        "templates": false,
        "version": "0.4.0"
    }
]

If you run datasette plugins --all it will include default plugins that ship as part of Datasette:

$ datasette plugins --all
[
    {
        "name": "datasette_json_html",
        "static": false,
        "templates": false,
        "version": "0.4.0"
    },
    {
        "name": "datasette.publish.heroku",
        "static": false,
        "templates": false,
        "version": null
    },
    {
        "name": "datasette.publish.now",
        "static": false,
        "templates": false,
        "version": null
    }
]

You can add the --plugins-dir= option to include any plugins found in that directory.

Packaging a plugin

Plugins can be packaged using Python setuptools. You can see an example of a packaged plugin at https://github.com/simonw/datasette-plugin-demos

The example consists of two files: a setup.py file that defines the plugin:

from setuptools import setup

VERSION = '0.1'

setup(
    name='datasette-plugin-demos',
    description='Examples of plugins for Datasette',
    author='Simon Willison',
    url='https://github.com/simonw/datasette-plugin-demos',
    license='Apache License, Version 2.0',
    version=VERSION,
    py_modules=['datasette_plugin_demos'],
    entry_points={
        'datasette': [
            'plugin_demos = datasette_plugin_demos'
        ]
    },
    install_requires=['datasette']
)

And a Python module file, datasette_plugin_demos.py, that implements the plugin:

from datasette import hookimpl
import random


@hookimpl
def prepare_jinja2_environment(env):
    env.filters['uppercase'] = lambda u: u.upper()


@hookimpl
def prepare_connection(conn):
    conn.create_function('random_integer', 2, random.randint)

Having built a plugin in this way you can turn it into an installable package using the following command:

python3 setup.py sdist

This will create a .tar.gz file in the dist/ directory.

You can then install your new plugin into a Datasette virtual environment or Docker container using pip:

pip install datasette-plugin-demos-0.1.tar.gz

To learn how to upload your plugin to PyPI for use by other people, read the PyPA guide to Packaging and distributing projects.

Static assets

If your plugin has a static/ directory, Datasette will automatically configure itself to serve those static assets from the following path:

/-/static-plugins/NAME_OF_PLUGIN_PACKAGE/yourfile.js

See the datasette-plugin-demos repository for an example of how to create a package that includes a static folder.

Custom templates

If your plugin has a templates/ directory, Datasette will attempt to load templates from that directory before it uses its own default templates.

The priority order for template loading is:

  • templates from the --template-dir argument, if specified
  • templates from the templates/ directory in any installed plugins
  • default templates that ship with Datasette

See Customization for more details on how to write custom templates, including which filenames to use to customize which parts of the Datasette UI.

Plugin configuration

Plugins can have their own configuration, embedded in a Metadata file. Configuration options for plugins live within a "plugins" key in that file, which can be included at the root, database or table level.

Here is an example of some plugin configuration for a specific table:

{
    "databases: {
        "sf-trees": {
            "tables": {
                "Street_Tree_List": {
                    "plugins": {
                        "datasette-cluster-map": {
                            "latitude_column": "lat",
                            "longitude_column": "lng"
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

This tells the datasette-cluster-map column which latitude and longitude columns should be used for a table called Street_Tree_List inside a database file called sf-trees.db.

When you are writing plugins, you can access plugin configuration like this using the datasette.plugin_config() method. If you know you need plugin configuration for a specific table, you can access it like this:

plugin_config = datasette.plugin_config(
    "datasette-cluster-map", database="sf-trees", table="Street_Tree_List"
)

This will return the {"latitude_column": "lat", "longitude_column": "lng"} in the above example.

If it cannot find the requested configuration at the table layer, it will fall back to the database layer and then the root layer. For example, a user may have set the plugin configuration option like so:

{
    "databases: {
        "sf-trees": {
            "plugins": {
                "datasette-cluster-map": {
                    "latitude_column": "xlat",
                    "longitude_column": "xlng"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

In this case, the above code would return that configuration for ANY table within the sf-trees database.

The plugin configuration could also be set at the top level of metadata.json:

{
    "title": "This is the top-level title in metadata.json",
    "plugins": {
        "datasette-cluster-map": {
            "latitude_column": "xlat",
            "longitude_column": "xlng"
        }
    }
}

Now that datasette-cluster-map plugin configuration will apply to every table in every database.

Plugin hooks

When you implement a plugin hook you can accept any or all of the parameters that are documented as being passed to that hook. For example, you can implement a render_cell plugin hook like this even though the hook definition defines more parameters than just value and column:

@hookimpl
def render_cell(value, column):
    if column == "stars":
        return "*" * int(value)

The full list of available plugin hooks is as follows.

prepare_connection(conn)

conn - sqlite3 connection object
The connection that is being opened

This hook is called when a new SQLite database connection is created. You can use it to register custom SQL functions, aggregates and collations. For example:

from datasette import hookimpl
import random

@hookimpl
def prepare_connection(conn):
    conn.create_function('random_integer', 2, random.randint)

This registers a SQL function called random_integer which takes two arguments and can be called like this:

select random_integer(1, 10);

prepare_jinja2_environment(env)

env - jinja2 Environment
The template environment that is being prepared

This hook is called with the Jinja2 environment that is used to evaluate Datasette HTML templates. You can use it to do things like register custom template filters, for example:

from datasette import hookimpl

@hookimpl
def prepare_jinja2_environment(env):
    env.filters['uppercase'] = lambda u: u.upper()

You can now use this filter in your custom templates like so:

Table name: {{ table|uppercase }}

extra_css_urls(template, database, table, datasette)

template - string
The template that is being rendered, e.g. database.html
database - string or None
The name of the database
table - string or None
The name of the table
datasette - Datasette instance
You can use this to access plugin configuration options via datasette.plugin_config(your_plugin_name)

Return a list of extra CSS URLs that should be included on the page. These can take advantage of the CSS class hooks described in Customization.

This can be a list of URLs:

from datasette import hookimpl

@hookimpl
def extra_css_urls():
    return [
        'https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.1.0/css/bootstrap.min.css'
    ]

Or a list of dictionaries defining both a URL and an SRI hash:

from datasette import hookimpl

@hookimpl
def extra_css_urls():
    return [{
        'url': 'https://stackpath.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/4.1.0/css/bootstrap.min.css',
        'sri': 'sha384-9gVQ4dYFwwWSjIDZnLEWnxCjeSWFphJiwGPXr1jddIhOegiu1FwO5qRGvFXOdJZ4',
    }]

extra_js_urls(template, database, table, datasette)

Same arguments as extra_css_urls.

This works in the same way as extra_css_urls() but for JavaScript. You can return either a list of URLs or a list of dictionaries:

from datasette import hookimpl

@hookimpl
def extra_js_urls():
    return [{
        'url': 'https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.3.1.slim.min.js',
        'sri': 'sha384-q8i/X+965DzO0rT7abK41JStQIAqVgRVzpbzo5smXKp4YfRvH+8abtTE1Pi6jizo',
    }]

You can also return URLs to files from your plugin’s static/ directory, if you have one:

from datasette import hookimpl

@hookimpl
def extra_js_urls():
    return [
        '/-/static-plugins/your_plugin/app.js'
    ]

publish_subcommand(publish)

publish - Click publish command group
The Click command group for the datasette publish subcommand

This hook allows you to create new providers for the datasette publish command. Datasette uses this hook internally to implement the default now and heroku subcommands, so you can read their source to see examples of this hook in action.

Let’s say you want to build a plugin that adds a datasette publish my_hosting_provider --api_key=xxx mydatabase.db publish command. Your implementation would start like this:

from datasette import hookimpl
from datasette.publish.common import add_common_publish_arguments_and_options
import click


@hookimpl
def publish_subcommand(publish):
    @publish.command()
    @add_common_publish_arguments_and_options
    @click.option(
        "-k",
        "--api_key",
        help="API key for talking to my hosting provider",
    )
    def my_hosting_provider(
        files,
        metadata,
        extra_options,
        branch,
        template_dir,
        plugins_dir,
        static,
        install,
        version_note,
        title,
        license,
        license_url,
        source,
        source_url,
        api_key,
    ):
        # Your implementation goes here

render_cell(value, column, table, database, datasette)

Lets you customize the display of values within table cells in the HTML table view.

value - string, integer or None
The value that was loaded from the database
column - string
The name of the column being rendered
table - string or None
The name of the table - or None if this is a custom SQL query
database - string
The name of the database
datasette - Datasette instance
You can use this to access plugin configuration options via datasette.plugin_config(your_plugin_name)

If your hook returns None, it will be ignored. Use this to indicate that your hook is not able to custom render this particular value.

If the hook returns a string, that string will be rendered in the table cell.

If you want to return HTML markup you can do so by returning a jinja2.Markup object.

Datasette will loop through all available render_cell hooks and display the value returned by the first one that does not return None.

Here is an example of a custom render_cell() plugin which looks for values that are a JSON string matching the following format:

{"href": "https://www.example.com/", "label": "Name"}

If the value matches that pattern, the plugin returns an HTML link element:

from datasette import hookimpl
import jinja2
import json


@hookimpl
def render_cell(value):
    # Render {"href": "...", "label": "..."} as link
    if not isinstance(value, str):
        return None
    stripped = value.strip()
    if not stripped.startswith("{") and stripped.endswith("}"):
        return None
    try:
        data = json.loads(value)
    except ValueError:
        return None
    if not isinstance(data, dict):
        return None
    if set(data.keys()) != {"href", "label"}:
        return None
    href = data["href"]
    if not (
        href.startswith("/") or href.startswith("http://")
        or href.startswith("https://")
    ):
        return None
    return jinja2.Markup('<a href="{href}">{label}</a>'.format(
        href=jinja2.escape(data["href"]),
        label=jinja2.escape(data["label"] or "") or "&nbsp;"
    ))

extra_body_script(template, database, table, datasette)

template - string
The template that is being rendered, e.g. database.html
database - string or None
The name of the database, or None if the page does not correspond to a database (e.g. the root page)
table - string or None
The name of the table, or None if the page does not correct to a table
datasette - Datasette instance
You can use this to access plugin configuration options via datasette.plugin_config(your_plugin_name)

Extra JavaScript to be added to a <script> block at the end of the <body> element on the page.

The template, database and table options can be used to return different code depending on which template is being rendered and which database or table are being processed.

The datasette instance is provided primarily so that you can consult any plugin configuration options that may have been set, using the datasette.plugin_config(plugin_name) method documented above.

The string that you return from this function will be treated as “safe” for inclusion in a <script> block directly in the page, so it is up to you to apply any necessary escaping.