Hosting my own copy of Datasette Lite from a fork
Datasette Lite is Simon Willison's build of Datasette (a tool that publishes a SQLite database as a browsable, queryable website) that runs entirely in the browser. Simon explains how it works, Python compiled to WebAssembly via Pyodide inside a web worker, in Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser, and the README lists the ?url=, ?csv=, ?json= and ?parquet= parameters for loading data. I won't repeat any of that here. This entry is only about running my own copy, at https://abdelhousni.github.io/datasette-lite/.
The whole site is static files
The repository root is the site: index.html, app.css and webworker.js, with no build step. So GitHub Pages (GitHub's free static hosting, see publishing a static site) can serve it straight from a branch: fork the repo, then in Settings → Pages pick Deploy from a branch, main, / (root). No workflow needed; the fork's only workflow, test.yml, just runs the tests.
Delete the inherited CNAME
The fork came with a CNAME file containing lite.datasette.io. GitHub Pages reads that file as "serve this site on this custom domain", so my fork tried to claim Simon's domain instead of using abdelhousni.github.io/datasette-lite. Deleting it (one commit, build: Delete CNAME) was the only change the fork needed. Any fork of a Pages site with a custom domain has the same trap.
Keeping it current
Because my only change is that deletion, catching up with upstream is a fast "Sync fork" on GitHub, or a merge that never conflicts. When I checked in October 2026, my main already sat on upstream's tip, 779b2d4, which added support for passing ?url= more than once to load several databases at the same time.
Credit: everything that makes this work is Simon Willison's; this is just how to host a copy of it.
TODO: serve this copy under my own domain. This site's custom domain, til.housni.eu, belongs to the til project site only, so it doesn't cover abdelhousni.github.io/datasette-lite. Either add a redirect page at til.housni.eu/datasette-lite/ that keeps the ?url= parameters, or put a subdomain such as lite.housni.eu in the fork's CNAME file and point a DNS record at it.
Created 2026-10-08T14:33:26+02:00 · Edit