datasette-lambda

Run Datasette on AWS as a serverless application:

Sufficiently small databases (unzipped size up to ~250 MB, zipped size up to ~50 MB) will be inlined in the Lambda deployment package. Others will be published to S3 and fetched on Lambda startup.

You can see a demo using Datasette's fixtures db here: https://datasette-demo.code402.com/

Getting started

Creating

Clone the repo and run ./update-stack <stack-name> [flags] <sqlite.db> [<sqlite.db> ...], e.g.:

git clone https://github.com/code402/datasette-lambda.git
cd datasette-lambda
./update-stack northwinds northwinds.db`

Some Datasette flags are supported:

• --config key:value, to set config options
• --cors, to enable Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * headers on responses
• --metadata <metadata.json>, to provide metadata

And some non-Datasette flags are supported:

• --domain example.com or --domain subdomain.example.com, if example.com is a hosted zone in Route 53
  • register a CNAME record that points to the CloudFront distribution
  • register an SSL certificate for the domain (you'll have to ack a confirmation email from Amazon)
  • associate that certificate to the CloudFront distribution
• --prefix some/path, to mount the Datasette app at a path other than the root

A CloudFormation stack will be created (or updated) with an S3 bucket.

The stub code and SQLite database(s) will be uploaded to the S3 bucket.

A second CloudFormation stack will then be created (or updated) with the necessary IAM roles, CloudFront, API Gateway and Lambda entities to expose your Datasette instance to the web.

Watching logs

./tail-logs <stack-name> will watch the CloudWatch logs for the Lambda (NB: not the API Gateway) service - this can be useful for debugging runtime errors in Datasette itself.

Destroying

Run ./delete-stack <stack-name> to tear down the infrastructure.

Note: AWS has a rough edge with deleting Lambda@Edge functions. You will need to run delete-stack, then wait a period of time, and run it again for the entire stack to be successfully removed. Ref: AWS docs

Known issues / future work

• Downloads from S3 should use an atomic fetch/rename to be robust against transient errors
• We should embed the DB in the Lambda package itself, when possible, to avoid the coldstart S3 fetch
• Repeated calls of update-stack should be robust against template-not-changed errors
• Fix issue with base_url not always being respected in generated URLs (maybe issue in how we use Mangum?)
• Be able to host multiple DBs
• Use the passed-in name of the DB as the DB name
• Create a CloudFront distribution
• Optionally be able to use a custom domain name on CloudFront
• Parity: Support CORS flag
• Parity: Support metadata flag
• Parity: Support config options
• Fix wrong absolute URLs for facets/next page (ds.absolute_url)
• Use API Gateway's faster/cheaper HTTP APIs instead of REST APIs (requires erm/mangum #94)

Maybe:

• Be able to customize the "mount" point of the CloudFront distribution
• Add support into core datasette's publish command, fixing #236