Tools for dumping/loading a SQLite database to diffable directory structure

pip install sqlite-diffable

Given a SQLite database called fixtures.db containing a table facetable, the following will dump out that table to the dump/ directory:

sqlite-diffable dump fixtures.db dump/ facetable

To dump out every table in that database, use --all:

sqlite-diffable dump fixtures.db dump/ --all

To load a previously dumped database, run the following:

sqlite-diffable load restored.db dump/

This will show an error if any of the tables that are being restored already exist in the database file.

You can replace those tables (dropping them before restoring them) using the --replace option:

sqlite-diffable load restored.db dump/ --replace

The repository at simonw/simonwillisonblog-backup contains a backup of the database on my blog, https://simonwillison.net/ - created using this tool.

Each table is represented as two files. The first, table_name.metadata.json, contains metadata describing the structure of the table. For a table called redirects_redirect that file might look like this:

{
    "name": "redirects_redirect",
    "columns": [
        "id",
        "domain",
        "path",
        "target",
        "created"
    ],
    "schema": "CREATE TABLE [redirects_redirect] (\n   [id] INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,\n   [domain] TEXT,\n   [path] TEXT,\n   [target] TEXT,\n   [created] TEXT\n)"
}

It is an object with three keys: name is the name of the table, columns is an array of column strings and schema is the SQL schema text used for tha table.

The second file, table_name.ndjson, contains [newline-delimeted JSON] for every row in the table. Each row is represented as a JSON array with items corresponding to each of the columns defined in the metadata.

That file for the redirects_redirect.ndjson table might look like this:

[1, "feeds.simonwillison.net", "swn-everything", "https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/", "2017-10-01T21:11:36.440537+00:00"]
[2, "feeds.simonwillison.net", "swn-entries", "https://simonwillison.net/atom/entries/", "2017-10-01T21:12:32.478849+00:00"]
[3, "feeds.simonwillison.net", "swn-links", "https://simonwillison.net/atom/links/", "2017-10-01T21:12:54.820729+00:00"]