dclient

February 27, 2026 · View on GitHub

A client CLI utility for Datasette instances.

Much of the functionality requires Datasette 1.0a2 or higher.

Things you can do with dclient

Browse table data with filtering, sorting, and pagination — no SQL required
Run SQL queries against Datasette and return the results as JSON, CSV, TSV, or an ASCII table
Introspect databases, tables, plugins, and schema
Run queries against authenticated Datasette instances
Create aliases and set default instances/databases for convenient access
Insert and upsert data using the write API (Datasette 1.0 alpha or higher)

Install this tool using pip:

pip install dclient

If you want to install it in the same virtual environment as Datasette (to use it as a plugin) you can instead run:

datasette install dclient

Add an alias for a Datasette instance:

dclient alias add latest https://latest.datasette.io
dclient default instance latest
dclient default database latest fixtures

Now run queries directly:

dclient "select * from facetable limit 1"

Or be explicit:

dclient query fixtures "select * from facetable limit 1" -i latest

Output as a table with -t, or use --csv, --tsv, --nl:

dclient "select pk, state from facetable limit 3" -t

Browse table rows without SQL:

dclient rows facetable -f state eq CA --sort _city_id -t

dclient databases
dclient tables
dclient plugins
dclient schema facetable

Visit dclient.datasette.io for full documentation on using this tool.

To contribute to this tool, first checkout the code. Then create a new virtual environment:

cd dclient
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Now install the dependencies and test dependencies:

pip install -e '.[test]'

To run the tests:

pytest