README.md

Tweasel open data Datasette instance

This repository contains the scripts for hosting, and configuration of the Tweasel open data Datasette instance hosted at data.tweasel.org. The homepage contains a more detailed description of what the instance is about. For technical details about how it was set up, see tweaselORG/meta#33.

Creating the main database

The main database is created dynamically, combining the datasets into a single requests table. To create the database, you need to have all the individual SQLite databases of the datasets (specified in datasets.json) in the datasets folder (they are not included in the repo but archived in a B2 bucket).

Then, you can run yarn make-database to create the database. This will (re-)create and correctly configure datasette/data.db.

Generate the cache file by running cd datasette && datasette inspect data.db --inspect-file=inspect-data.json.

Running Datasette

We are using Datasette in configuration directory mode, as such you only need to pass that folder to get the correct configuration:

datasette datasette/

Adding a new dataset

To add a new dataset, you need to:

1. Create an SQLite database of the requests in the dataset in the correct format. See: example of creating such a database from HAR files, examples of creating such a database from an existing PostgreSQL database
2. Upload the SQLite database to the B2 bucket.
3. Store the SQLite database in the datasets folder (with a name of <slug>.db).
4. Add the dataset and its metadata to datasets.json.
5. Mention the dataset in datasette/templates/index.html (in the "Datasets" section).
6. Run yarn make-database to recreate the main database.
7. Regenerate the cache file by running cd datasette && datasette inspect data.db --inspect-file=inspect-data.json.

Plugins

We are using the following Datasette plugins:

• datasette-copyable
• datasette-graphql
• datasette-jq
• datasette-sqlite-regex
• datasette-sqlite-url
• datasette-sqlite-path
• datasette-cors