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WebAuthn browser support

I started exploring WebAuthn today - a set of browser standards that adds support for both Yubikey 2FA hardware devices and "platform" authentication using things like Touch ID and Face ID.

Run pytest against a specific Python version using Docker

For datasette issue 1802 I needed to run my test suite using a specific version of Python 3.7. I decided to do this using Docker, using the official python:3.7-buster image.

Skipping a GitHub Actions step without failing

I wanted to have a GitHub Action step run that might fail, but if it failed the rest of the steps should still execute and the overall run should be treated as a success.

Transcribing MP3s with whisper-cpp on macOS

I asked on Twitter for tips about running Whisper transcriptions in the CLI on my Mac. Werner Robitza pointed me to Homebrew's whisper-cpp formula, and when I complained that it didn't have quite…

Using a Tailscale exit node with GitHub Actions

For an (ethical) scraping project I found that my low-volume scraper was working from my laptop but was being blocked by Cloudflare when I attempted to run it in GitHub Actions, presumably because the…

Using unnest() to use a comma-separated string as the input to an IN query

django-sql-dashboard lets you define a SQL query plus one or more text inputs that the user can provide in order to execute the query.

Workaround for google-github-actions/setup-gcloud errors

I used the google-github-actions/setup-gcloud action in all of my GitHub Actions workflows that deploy applications to Cloud Run.

The SQLite now argument is stable within the same query

I stumbled across an interesting little detail of SQLite today, running the following query: That pattern is described here and in this TIL, it returns the current Unix timestamp in milliseconds.

Using namedtuple for pytest parameterized tests

I'm writing some quite complex pytest parameterized tests this morning, and I was finding it a little bit hard to read the test cases as the number of parameters grew.

Packaging a Python app as a standalone binary with PyInstaller

PyInstaller can take a Python script and bundle it up as a standalone executable for macOS, Linux and apparently Windows too (I've not tried it on Windows yet).

Providing a "subscribe in Google Calendar" link for an ics feed

If you provide your own custom generated ICS file hosted at a URL it's nice to be able to give Google Calendar users an easy way to subscribe to that feed.

The Wikipedia page stats API

Via https://alexgarcia.xyz/dataflow/examples/wiki-pageviews/ I found this API for retrieving daily pageview stats from Wikipedia for any article: - https://wikimedia.org/api/rest…

Read the Docs Search API

I stumbled across this API today: https://docs.datasette.io/ /api/v2/docsearch/?q=startup&project=datasette&version=stable&language=en It's used by the search feature at…

Reporting bugs in GitHub to GitHub

I found out today (via this post) about a dedicated interface for reporting bugs in GitHub to GitHub: https://support.github.com/contact/bug-report It includes full markdown support, which means you…

Splitting on commas in SQLite

I had an input string in format and I needed to split it into three separate values in SQLite. I managed to do it using a confusing combination of the and functions.

Using curl to run GraphQL queries from the command line

I wanted to run a query against the GitHub GraphQL API using on the command line, while keeping the query itself as readable as possible.

Installing Python on macOS with the official Python installer

I usually use Homebrew on macOS, but I decided to try using the official Python installer based on this Twitter conversation.

Testing the Access-Control-Max-Age CORS header

Today I noticed that Datasette wasn't serving a header. This meant that any CORS pre-flight requests would be repeated for every request, which hurts performance - the browser should be able to cache…

Writing an Azure Function that serves all traffic to a subdomain

Azure Functions default to serving traffic from a path like - for example . If you want to serve an entire website through a single function (e.g.

Only run GitHub Action on push to master / main

Spotted in this Cloud Run example: Useful if you don't want people opening pull requests against your repo that inadvertantly trigger a deploy action!