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# Getting started

## Play with a live demo

The best way to experience Datasette for the first time is with a demo:

- global-power-plants.datasettes.com provides a searchable database of power plants around the world, using data from the World Resources Institude rendered using the datasette-cluster-map plugin.

- fivethirtyeight.datasettes.com shows Datasette running against over 400 datasets imported from the FiveThirtyEight GitHub repository.

## Follow a tutorial

Datasette has several tutorials to help you get started with the tool. Try one of the following:

- Exploring a database with Datasette shows how to use the Datasette web interface to explore a new database.

- Learn SQL with Datasette introduces SQL, and shows how to use that query language to ask questions of your data.

- Cleaning data with sqlite-utils and Datasette guides you through using sqlite-utils to turn a CSV file into a database that you can explore using Datasette.

## Datasette in your browser with Datasette Lite

Datasette Lite is Datasette packaged using WebAssembly so that it runs entirely in your browser, no Python web application server required.

You can pass a URL to a CSV, SQLite or raw SQL file directly to Datasette Lite to explore that data in your browser.

This example link opens Datasette Lite and loads the SQL Murder Mystery example database from Northwestern University Knight Lab.

## Try Datasette without installing anything with Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces offers a free browser-based development environment that lets you run a development server without installing any local software.

Here's a demo project on GitHub which you can use as the basis for your own experiments:

github.com/datasette/datasette-studio

The README file in that repository has instructions on how to get started.

## Using Datasette on your own computer

First, follow the Installation instructions. Now you can run Datasette against a SQLite file on your computer using the following command:

    datasette path/to/database.db

This will start a web server on port 8001 - visit http://localhost:8001/ to access the web interface.

Add `-o` to open your browser automatically once Datasette has started:

    datasette path/to/database.db -o

Use Chrome on OS X? You can run datasette against your browser history like so:

    datasette ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome/Default/History --nolock

The `--nolock` option ignores any file locks. This is safe as Datasette will open the file in read-only mode.

Now visiting http://localhost:8001/History/downloads will show you a web interface to browse your downloads data:

Downloads table rendered by datasette

http://localhost:8001/History/downloads.json will return that data as JSON:

    {
        "database": "History",
        "columns": [
            "id",
            "current_path",
            "target_path",
            "start_time",
            "received_bytes",
            "total_bytes",
            ...
        ],
        "rows": [
            [
                1,
                "/Users/simonw/Downloads/DropboxInstaller.dmg",
                "/Users/simonw/Downloads/DropboxInstaller.dmg",
                13097290269022132,
                626688,
                0,
                ...
            ]
        ]
    }

http://localhost:8001/History/downloads.json?_shape=objects will return that data as JSON in a more convenient format:

    {
        ...
        "rows": [
            {
                "start_time": 13097290269022132,
                "interrupt_reason": 0,
                "hash": "",
                "id": 1,
                "site_url": "",
                "referrer": "https://www.dropbox.com/downloading?src=index",
                ...
            }
        ]
    }