Configure datasette to automatically assign an available port

Getting a working Datasette Web interface with something as simple as datasette whatever.db is awesome!

But...

This defaults to localhost:8001. Every time. If you are using Datasette a lot, you might run datasette cats.db and see:

ERROR:    [Errno 48] error while attempting to bind on address ('127.0.0.1', 8001): address already in use

😿

The built-in help for datasette is really useful.

• When you run datasette my.db, datasette defaults to the serve subcommand so it effectively runs datasette serve my.db.

From datasette serve --help, we learn about the --port option. While that would be pretty straightforward to guess, there's a further reward for reading the docs:

Use -p 0 to automatically assign an available port.

Nice!

We can use something like this to make sure datasette finds a usable port and uses it:

datasette -p 0 cats.db

# 😻