Datasette plugin allowing live editing of configuration (metadata.json and --plugin-secret) with no server restarts required.
Installing via GitHub is the simplest.
datasette install git+https://github.com/next-LI/datasette-live-config.git
That's it! You can specify a version, branch or SHA1 by adding an @ symbol followed by the identifier, e.g.: @v0.12.7
Then basic python module install:
python setup.py install
If you need to update the JS side of things (dynamic configuration editor or the metadata schema), run this instead:
(cd config-ed && npm run build) && python setup.py install
This plugin adds a "Configuration editor" entry to the menu, which leads to /-/live-config interface.
There's two ways to set configuration:
- Globally. These are stored in the
live_config.dband control things like Datasette overall title, description and also lets you set metadata for DBs and tables. - Individual DBs. These are stored inside of each database file in the
_metadatatable. These settings are specific to the DB and will allow people with permission only to a specific DB to set metadata for that DB.
It has one optional config using metadata.yaml to specify the directory where the live_config.db will be stored.
plugins:
datasette-live-config:
db_path: /app/secrets/
Adding the above to your metadata.yml will make your configuration DB show up at /app/secrets/live_config.db.
By default, the live_config.db will be placed in the current working directory that Datasette is ran from (typically this is the same directory as the rest of your other DBs). If you have the datasette-live-permissions plugin, permissions will be added to hide this DB from view so that people won't try to edit it manually.
This plugin leverages Datasette's permissioning system to control who can set both global and DB-specific metadata.
For global settings, the "live-config" permission is used. This surfaces the "Configuration" link in the drop down menu.
For DB-specific settings the ("live-config", DB_NAME) permission is used. This surfaces a database action (gear icon next to the DB name on the DB page) that will take users to the DB specific configuration page.
It is suggested you use the datasette-live-permissions plugin with this plugin as they are complementary.
This plugin requires Datasette version 0.58 and above. It uses the get_metadata hook. The hook allows plugins to provide configuration to Datasette dynamically, which is what the live-config plugin is doing: reading configuration from a database, merging them together with any local configurations and providing it to Datasette.
This allows for a nearly fully dynamic system that you might expect with other web frameworks. The only limitation is importing new databases, but dynamic imports are supported by a separate, but related plugin that we also developed called csv-importer.
The UI is built based on JSON schema of the metadata.json as defined in the Datasette documentation. It can be found in the config-ed/src/schema.js file.