I need this for Datasette Cloud, and in thinking it through I realized that it's really time Datasette grew a default write API as well.

I'm going to mostly model this off sqlite-utils, since I've spent a bunch of time iterating on a pseudo-JSON API for that over the past few years (piping JSON to stdin etc).

I want this for Datasette 1.0. I'm going to be building it in the new 1.0-dev branch, which is automatically deployed to https://latest-1-0-dev.datasette.io/ running on Cloud Run.

API features to build:

• Default API token authentication mechanism #1852
  • allow_signed_tokens setting for disabling API signed token mechanism #1856
  • Prevent API tokens from using /-/create-token to create more tokens #1857
  • max_signed_tokens_ttl setting for a maximum duration on API tokens #1858
  • datasette create-token CLI command #1859
• API explorer tool #1871
  • API explorer should take immutability into account #1888
• Design URLs for the write API #1868
• API to insert a single record into an existing table #1851
• Update a single record in an existing table #1863
• Delete a single record from an existing table #1864
• API for bulk inserting records into a table #1866
• /db/-/create API for creating tables #1882
• Create a new table from one or more records, sqlite-utils style #1862
• API to drop a table #1874
  • Add a confirm step to the drop table API #1887
• Refactor and tidy up final write API code #1877

Bumped to later on:

• datasette create-token ability to create tokens with a reduced set of permissions #1855
• /db/table/-/upsert API #1878
• Ensure insert API has good tests for rowid and compound primark key tables #1873
• Figure out design for JSON errors (consider RFC 7807) #1875
• Make sure CORS works
• Ability to create new tokens via the API #1889
• Alter a table - sqlite-utils transform style (more powerful than straight ALTER)
• Execute SQL against a write connection
• Maybe even multiple write SQL statements bundled in a single transaction
• /db/table/-/rename API (also allows atomic replace) #1867