Installation

Note

If you just want to try Datasette out you don’t need to install anything: see Try Datasette without installing anything using Glitch

There are two main options for installing Datasette. You can install it directly on to your machine, or you can install it using Docker.

Using Docker

A Docker image containing the latest release of Datasette is published to Docker Hub here: https://hub.docker.com/r/datasetteproject/datasette/

If you have Docker installed (for example with Docker for Mac on OS X) you can download and run this image like so:

docker run -p 8001:8001 -v `pwd`:/mnt \
    datasetteproject/datasette \
    datasette -p 8001 -h 0.0.0.0 /mnt/fixtures.db

This will start an instance of Datasette running on your machine’s port 8001, serving the fixtures.db file in your current directory.

Now visit http://127.0.0.1:8001/ to access Datasette.

(You can download a copy of fixtures.db from https://latest.datasette.io/fixtures.db )

Loading Spatialite

The datasetteproject/datasette image includes a recent version of the SpatiaLite extension for SQLite. To load and enable that module, use the following command:

docker run -p 8001:8001 -v `pwd`:/mnt \
    datasetteproject/datasette \
    datasette -p 8001 -h 0.0.0.0 /mnt/fixtures.db \
    --load-extension=/usr/local/lib/mod_spatialite.so

You can confirm that SpatiaLite is successfully loaded by visiting http://127.0.0.1:8001/-/versions

Installing plugins

If you want to install plugins into your local Datasette Docker image you can do so using the following recipe. This will install the plugins and then save a brand new local image called datasette-with-plugins:

docker run datasetteproject/datasette \
    pip install datasette-vega

docker commit $(docker ps -lq) datasette-with-plugins

You can now run the new custom image like so:

docker run -p 8001:8001 -v `pwd`:/mnt \
    datasette-with-plugins \
    datasette -p 8001 -h 0.0.0.0 /mnt/fixtures.db

You can confirm that the plugins are installed by visiting http://127.0.0.1:8001/-/plugins

Install using pip

To run Datasette without Docker you will need Python 3.5 or higher.

You can install Datasette and its dependencies using pip:

pip install datasette

If you want to install Datasette in its own virtual environment, use this:

python -mvenv datasette-venv
source datasette-venv/bin/activate
pip install datasette

You can now run Datasette like so:

datasette fixtures.db

If you want to start making contributions to the Datasette project by installing a copy that lets you directly modify the code, take a look at our guide to Setting up a development environment.