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A pluggable app that allows users (admins) to execute SQL, view, and export the results. Inspired by Stack Exchange Data Explorer.

Project description

https://travis-ci.org/epantry/django-sql-explorer.png?branch=master

Django SQL Explorer

Django SQL Explorer is inspired by Stack Exchange’s Data Explorer and is designed to make the flow of data between people in your company fast, simple, and confusion-free. Quickly write and share SQL queries in a clean, usable query builder, preview the results in the browser, share links to download CSV files, and keep the information flowing baby!

django-sql-explorer is MIT licensed, and pull requests are welcome!

A view of a query

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/django-sql-explorer/2.png

Viewing all queries

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/django-sql-explorer/query-list.png

Quick access to DB schema info

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/django-sql-explorer/3.png

Snapshot query results to S3 & download as csv

https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/django-sql-explorer/snapshots.png

Features

  • Security
    • Let’s not kid ourselves - this tool is all about giving people access to running SQL in production. So if that makes you nervous (and it should) - you’ve been warned. Explorer makes an effort to not allow terrible things to happen, but be careful! It’s recommended you use the EXPLORER_CONNECTION_NAME setting to connect SQL Explorer to a read-only database role.

    • Explorer supports two different permission checks for users of the tool. Users passing the EXPLORER_PERMISSION_CHANGE test can create, edit, delete, and execute queries. Users who do not pass this test but pass the EXPLORER_PERMISSION_VIEW test can only execute queries. Other users cannot access any part of Explorer. Both permission groups are set to is_staff by default and can be overridden in your settings file.

    • Enforces a SQL blacklist so destructive queries don’t get executed (delete, drop, alter, update etc). This is not bulletproof and it’s recommended that you instead configure a read-only database role, but when not possible the blacklist provides reasonable protection.

  • Easy to get started
    • Built on Django’s ORM, so works with Postgresql, Mysql, and Sqlite.

    • Small number of dependencies.

    • Just want to get in and write some ad-hoc queries? Go nuts with the Playground area.

  • new Snapshots
    • Tick the ‘snapshot’ box on a query, and Explorer will upload a .csv snapshot of the query results to S3. Configure the snapshot frequency via a celery cron task, e.g. for daily at 1am:

    'explorer.tasks.snapshot_queries': {
        'task': 'explorer.tasks.snapshot_queries',
        'schedule': crontab(hour=1, minute=0)
    }
    • Requires celery, obviously. Also uses djcelery and tinys3. All of these deps are optional and can be installed with pip install -r optional-requirements.txt

    • The checkbox for opting a query into a snapshot is ALL THE WAY on the bottom of the query view (underneath the restults table).

  • new Email query results
    • Click the email icon in the query listing view, enter an email address, and the query results (zipped .csv) will be sent to you.

  • Parameterized Queries
    • Use $$foo$$ in your queries and Explorer will build a UI to fill out parameters. When viewing a query like ‘SELECT * FROM table WHERE id=$$id$$’, Explorer will generate UI for the ‘id’ parameter.

    • Parameters are stashed in the URL, so you can share links to parameterized queries with colleagues

  • Schema Helper
    • /explorer/schema/ renders a list of your Django apps’ table and column names + types that you can refer to while writing queries. Apps can be excluded from this list so users aren’t bogged down with tons of irrelevant tables. See settings documentation below for details.

    • This is available quickly as a sidebar helper while composing queries (see screenshot)

    • Supports many_to_many relations as well.

    • Quick search for the tables/django models you are looking for. Just start typing!

  • Template Columns
    • Let’s say you have a query like ‘select id, email from user’ and you’d like to quickly drill through to the profile page for each user in the result. You can create a “template” column to do just that.

    • Just set up a template column in your settings file:

    EXPLORER_TRANSFORMS = [('user', '<a href="https://yoursite.com/profile/{0}/">{0}</a>')]

    • And change your query to ‘SELECT id AS “user”, email FROM user’. Explorer will match the “user” column alias to the transform and merge each cell in that column into the template string. Cool!

  • Simple Charts
    • Using the Charted JS library from Medium, you can view results as either a table (default) or a chart. Just click on the “chart” tab.

  • Query Logs
    • Explorer will save a snapshot of every query you execute so you can recover lost ad-hoc queries, and see what you’ve been querying.

    • This also serves as cheap-and-dirty versioning of Queries, and provides the ‘run count’ property by aggregating the logs.

  • Stable
    • 95% according to coverage…for what that’s worth. Just install factory_boy and run manage.py test –settings=explorer.tests.settings

    • Battle-tested in production every day by the ePantry team.

  • Power tips
    • On the query listing page, focus gets set to a search box so you can just navigate to /explorer and start typing the name of your query to find it.

    • Quick search also works after hitting “Show Schema” on a query view.

    • Command+Enter and Ctrl+Enter will execute a query when typing in the SQL editor area.

    • Hit the “Format” button to format and clean up your SQL (this is non-validating – just formatting).

    • Use the Query Logs feature to share one-time queries that aren’t worth creating a persistent query for. Just run your SQL in the playground, then navigate to /logs and share the link (e.g. /explorer/play/?querylog_id=2428)

    • If you need to download a query as something other than csv but don’t want to globally change delimiters via settings.EXPLORER_CSV_DELIMETER, you can use /query/download?delim=| to get a pipe (or whatever) delimited file. For a tab-delimited file, use delim=tab. Note that the file extension will remain .csv

    • If a query is taking a long time to run (perhaps timing out) and you want to get in there to optimize it, go to /query/123/?show=0. You’ll see the normal query detail page, but the query won’t execute.

    • Set env vars for EXPLORER_TOKEN_AUTH_ENABLED=TRUE and EXPLORER_TOKEN=<SOME TOKEN> and you have an instant data API. Just:

    curl --header "X-API-TOKEN: <TOKEN>" https://www.your-site.com/explorer/<QUERY_ID>/csv

Install

Requires Python 2.6, 2.7 or 3.4. Requires Django 1.6.7 or higher. In theory Explorer should work fine with earlier versions of Django, but this has not been tested. South migrations exist for Django 1.6 and earlier, but by default Explorer uses 1.7 migrations.

Install with pip from github:

pip install django-sql-explorer

Add to your installed_apps:

INSTALLED_APPS = ( ..., 'explorer', ... )

Add the following to your urls.py (all Explorer URLs are restricted to staff only per default):

url(r'^explorer/', include('explorer.urls')),

Run syncdb to create the tables:

python manage.py syncdb

You can now browse to https://yoursite/explorer/ and get exploring! However note it is highly recommended that you also configure Explorer to use a read-only database connection via the EXPLORER_CONNECTION_NAME setting.

Using South Migrations

Explorer by default uses the new migrations in Django 1.7 to manage database schema. However South migrations also exist in the south_migrations folder, for those still using Django 1.6 or earlier. To use South migrations, For South support, customize the SOUTH_MIGRATION_MODULES setting like so:

SOUTH_MIGRATION_MODULES = { 'explorer': 'explorer.south_migrations', }

Migrations were introduced in version 0.5. So if you are upgrading from an earlier version of explorer and using South, you’ll have to run the following to convert Explorer to a South application:

python manage.py migrate explorer 0001 --fake

You can then run the rest of the migrations as usual.

python manage.py migrate explorer

If you are installing Explorer for the first time, you can just follow the normal installation instructions.

Dependencies

An effort has been made to keep the number of dependencies to a minimum.

Back End

Name

Version

License

sqlparse

0.1.11

BSD

Factory Boy

2.4.1

MIT

unicodecsv

0.13.0

BSD

  • sqlparse is Used for SQL formatting only

  • Facotry Boy is only required for tests

  • unicodecsv is used for CSV generation

Front End

Name

Version

License

Twitter Boostrap

3.3.0

MIT

jQuery

2.1.1

MIT

jQuery Cookie

1.4.1

MIT

Underscore

1.7.0

MIT

Codemirror

4.7.0

MIT

floatThead

1.2.8

MIT

charted

0.1.1

MIT

list.js

1.1.1

MIT

Most are served from cdnjs, except for Charted, which is served locally.

Factory Boy is needed if you’d like to run the tests, which can you do easily:

python manage.py test --settings=explorer.tests.settings

and with coverage:

coverage run --source='.' manage.py test --settings=explorer.tests.settings

Settings

Setting

Description

Default

EXPLORER_SQL_BLACKLIST

Disallowed words in SQL queries to prevent destructive actions.

(‘ALTER’, ‘RENAME ‘, ‘DROP’, ‘TRUNCATE’, ‘INSERT INTO’, ‘UPDATE’, ‘REPLACE’, ‘DELETE’, ‘ALTER’, ‘CREATE TABLE’, ‘SCHEMA’, ‘GRANT’, ‘OWNER TO’)

EXPLORER_SQL_WHITELIST

These phrases are allowed, even though part of the phrase appears in the blacklist.

(‘CREATED’, ‘DELETED’)

EXPLORER_DEFAULT_ROWS

The number of rows to show by default in the preview pane.

100

EXPLORER_SCHEMA_EXCLUDE_APPS

Don’t show schema for these packages in the schema helper.

(‘django.contrib.auth’, ‘django.contrib.contenttypes’, ‘django.contrib.sessions’, ‘django.contrib.admin’)

EXPLORER_CONNECTION_NAME

The name of the Django database connection to use. Ideally set this to a connection with read only permissions

None # Which means use the ‘default’ connection

EXPLORER_PERMISSION_VIEW

Callback to check if the user is allowed to view and execute stored queries

lambda u: u.is_staff

EXPLORER_PERMISSION_CHANGE

Callback to check if the user is allowed to add/change/delete queries

lambda u: u.is_staff

EXPLORER_TRANSFORMS

List of tuples like [(‘alias’, ‘Template for {0}’)]. See features section of this doc for more info.

[]

EXPLORER_RECENT_QUERY_COUNT

The number of recent queries to show at the top of the query listing.

10

EXPLORER_GET_USER_QUERY_VIEWS

A dict granting view permissions on specific queries of the form {userId:[queryId, …], …}

{}

EXPLORER_TOKEN_AUTH_ENABLED

Bool indicating whether token-authenticated requests should be enabled. See “Power Tips”, above.

False

EXPLORER_TOKEN

Access token for query results.

“CHANGEME”

EXPLORER_TASKS_ENABLED

Turn on if you want to use the snapshot_queries celery task in tasks.py

False

EXPLORER_S3_ACCESS_KEY

S3 Access Key for snapshot upload

None

EXPLORER_S3_SECRET_KEY

S3 Secret Key for snapshot upload

None

EXPLORER_S3_BUCKET

S3 Bucket for snapshot upload

None

Release Process

Release process is documented here. If there are problems with the release, please help me improve the process so it doesn’t happen again!

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