Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape or size and publish that as an interactive, explorable website and accompanying API.
Datasette is aimed at data journalists, museum curators, archivists, local governments, scientists, researchers and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world.
[Explore a demo](https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/global-power-plants/global-power-plants), watch [a video about the project](https://simonwillison.net/2021/Feb/7/video/) or try it out by [uploading and publishing your own CSV data](https://docs.datasette.io/en/stable/getting_started.html#try-datasette-without-installing-anything-using-glitch).
Want to stay up-to-date with the project? Subscribe to the [Datasette newsletter](https://datasette.substack.com/) for tips, tricks and news on what's new in the Datasette ecosystem.
Datasette requires Python 3.7 or higher. We also have [detailed installation instructions](https://docs.datasette.io/en/stable/installation.html) covering other options such as Docker.
Now visiting http://localhost:8001/History/downloads will show you a web interface to browse your downloads data:
![Downloads table rendered by datasette](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2017/datasette-downloads.png)
## metadata.json
If you want to include licensing and source information in the generated datasette website you can do so using a JSON file that looks something like this:
If you have [Heroku](https://heroku.com/) or [Google Cloud Run](https://cloud.google.com/run/) configured, Datasette can deploy one or more SQLite databases to the internet with a single command:
This will create a docker image containing both the datasette application and the specified SQLite database files. It will then deploy that image to Heroku or Cloud Run and give you a URL to access the resulting website and API.
[Datasette Lite](https://lite.datasette.io/) is Datasette packaged using WebAssembly so that it runs entirely in your browser, no Python web application server required. Read more about that in the [Datasette Lite documentation](https://github.com/simonw/datasette-lite/blob/main/README.md).