Datasette 1.0a24 (https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/changelog.html#a24-2026-01-29)

New Datasette alpha this morning. Key new features:

• Datasette’s Request object can now handle multipart/form-data file uploads via the new await request.form(files=True) (https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/internals.html#internals-formdata) method. I plan to use this for a datasette-files plugin to support attaching files to rows of data.

• The recommended development environment (https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/contributing.html#setting-up-a-development-environment) for hacking on Datasette itself now uses uv (https://github.com/astral-sh/uv). Crucially, you can clone Datasette and run uv run pytest to run the tests without needing to manually create a virtual environment or install dependencies first, thanks to the dev dependency group pattern (https://til.simonwillison.net/uv/dependency-groups).

• A new ?_extra=render_cell parameter for both table and row JSON pages to return the results of executing the render_cell() plugin hook (https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/plugin_hooks.html#render-cell-row-value-column-table-database-datasette-request). This should unlock new JavaScript UI features in the future.

More details in the release notes (https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/changelog.html#a24-2026-01-29). I also invested a bunch of work in eliminating flaky tests that were intermittently failing in CI - I think those are all handled now.

Tags: projects (https://simonwillison.net/tags/projects), python (https://simonwillison.net/tags/python), datasette (https://simonwillison.net/tags/datasette), annotated-release-notes (https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-release-notes), uv (https://simonwillison.net/tags/uv)