[feature request] Publish to fully static website

[contrun]

It seems currently all datasette publish requires a real backend server which is able to query the database and send results back to the frontend. There are a few projects to on-demand download a portion of data from the database from a sqlite lite database url, and present it directly to the user. These methods leverages web assembly under the hood. I think datasette is a perfect use case for this technology. Below are a few examples of querying sqlite database from frontend directly.

• Using sqlite3 as a notekeeping document graph with automatic reference indexing
• Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages - (or any static file hoster) - phiresky's blog
• Static torrent website with peer-to-peer queries over BitTorrent on 2M records

[simonw]

Those client-side SQLite tricks are really neat.

datasette publish defaults to configuring it so the raw SQLite database can be downloaded from /fixtures.db - and this issue updated it to be served with a CORS header that would allow client-side scripts to load the file:

• --cors should enable /fixtures.db CORS access #1057

If you're not going to run any server-side code at all you don't need Datasette for this - you can upload the SQLite database file to any static hosting with CORS headers and load it into the client that way.

In terms of static publishing, I do think there's something interesting about using Datasette to generate static sites. There's an issue discussing options for that over here:

• Scripted exports #1605