--cp option for datasette publish and datasette package for shipping additional files and directories

I’m working on integrating Datasette into a documentation-oriented publishing workflow internally in my company, and in order to deploy the Docker image created by datasette package I need to add an additional file to the image — in my case, it’s a sort of a deployment directive. I’ve worked out a way to do this after the image has been created, but it’s convoluted and brittle.

So it’d be excellent if there was an additional option for this command, something like, like, --copy.

I’d envision it looking something like:

$ datasette package --copy /the/source/path:/the/target/path data.db

I’d be happy to help design, specify, implement, and test this feature, if you’d be interested.

Thanks for the fantastic tools!

[simonw]

Sure, --cp looks good to me.

[simonw]

Interesting feature suggestion.

My initial instinct was that this would be better handled using the layered nature of Docker - so build a Docker image with datasette package and then have a separate custom script which takes that image, copies in the extra data and outputs a new image.

But… datasette package is already meant to be more convenient than messing around with Docker by hand like this - so actually having a --copy option like you describe here feels like it’s within scope of what datasette package is meant to do.

So yeah - if you’re happy to design this I think it would be worth us adding.

Small design suggestion: allow --copy to be applied multiple times, so you can do something like this:

datasette package \
    --copy ~/project/templates /templates \
    --copy ~/project/README.md /README.md \
    data.db

Also since Click arguments can take multiple options I don’t think you need to have the : in there - although if it better matches Docker’s own UI it might be more consistent to have it.