datasette fixtures.db --get "/fixtures.json"

[simonw]

I can expose ALL of Datasette's functionality on the command-line (without even running a web server) by adding --get and --post options to datasette serve.

datasette fixtures.db --get "/fixtures.json"

This would instantiate the Datasette ASGI app, run a fake request for /fixtures.json through it, dump the results out to standard output and quit.

A --post option could do the same for a POST request. Treating that as a stretch goal for the moment.

[simonw]

I partly want this so I can easily implement a better test method for the Homebrew package. The test I have right now looks like this:

https://github.com/simonw/homebrew-datasette/blob/8aa30aa183158051a987a7e3f50e7e3ee05d8ee9/Formula/datasette.rb#L125-L127

  test do
    system bin/"datasette", "--help"
  end

The Homebrew docs at https://docs.brew.sh/Formula-Cookbook#add-a-test-to-the-formula say:

We want tests that don't require any user input and test the basic functionality of the application. For example foo build-foo input.foo is a good test and (despite their widespread use) foo --version and foo --help are bad tests. However, a bad test is better than no test at all.

[simonw]

$ datasette --get '/:memory:.json?sql=select+sqlite_version()' | jq .
{
  "database": ":memory:",
  "query_name": null,
  "rows": [
    [
      "3.32.3"
    ]
  ],
  "truncated": false,
  "columns": [
    "sqlite_version()"
  ],
  "query": {
    "sql": "select sqlite_version()",
    "params": {}
  },
  "private": false,
  "allow_execute_sql": true,
  "query_ms": 1.165628433227539
}