I ran into a tricky problem while working on this issue: the following line was behaving in an unexpected way for me:
datasette content.db *.db --create
What I expect this to do is to create a content.db database if one does not exist, and then start Datasette with both that database and any other databases that exist in the directory.
The surprising behaviour occurred when the directory started off empty. Running the above in bash caused a file called *.db to be created in the directory.
It turns out if bash can't find any files matching a wildcard it passes that wildcard as a literal value to the underlying command!
sh does the same thing. zsh returns an error:
% datasette content.db *.db --create
zsh: no matches found: *.db
The solution, for bash, is to set the nullglob shell option. That can be done like this:
shopt -s nullglob
This lasts for the rest of the interactive session, and causes bash to behave the way I expected it to, completely ignoring the *.db wildcard if it has no matches.
I originally ran into this because I had a Dockerfile with a last line that looked like this:
CMD datasette serve --host 0.0.0.0 --cors --inspect-file inspect-data.json --metadata metadata.json /data/tiddlywiki.db --create --port $PORT /data/*.db
The goal here was to serve any existing databases in the /data/ mounted volume, and to explicitly create that tiddlywiki.db database if it did not exist.
But it created a *.db database file if the folder was empty, due to the issue described above.
I ended up using this recipe to work around the problem:
CMD ["/bin/bash", "-c", "shopt -s nullglob && datasette serve --host 0.0.0.0 --cors --inspect-file inspect-data.json /data/tiddlywiki.db --create --port $PORT /data/*.db"]
This uses CMD to execute /bin/bash and pass it a one-liner that sets nullglob and then calls Datasette. This worked as intended.
Created 2022-02-14T21:16:05-08:00 · Edit