Option to automatically configure based on directory layout

My Datasette projects increasingly take on the following structure:

• metadata.json with the metadata
• One or more something.db database files
• A templates/ folder with some custom templates
• A plugins/ folder with some custom plugins

Then I have to run Datasette like this:

datasette *.db -m metadata.json --template-dir=templates --plugins-dir=plugins

It would be really interesting if Datasette had a special mode where you could point it at a directory with the above layout and it would automatically configure itself based on the contents.

Maybe even allow datasette serve to detect if it was passed a single argument that’s a directory, not a file, and kick in to “directory layout configuration mode” in that case:

datasette .

[simonw]

Documentation: https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/latest/config.html#configuration-directory-mode

[simonw]

As an alternative to --static this could work by letting you create the following:

• static/css/
• static/js/

Which would be automatically mounted at /js/... and /css/...

Or maybe just mount static/ at /static/ instead?