Using sqlite as database for developing Weblate

[juliancoffee]

I know that docs recommend Postgres or Docker, but it does require a bit of additional set-up.
I'm right now reading PostgreSQL documentation on that topic, so it's not a hard blocker for me, but I was curious if it's possible to somehow just use sqlite in Django's settings.py.

I started with these docs https://docs.weblate.org/en/latest/contributing/start.html

This is the relevant bit I changed in weblate/settings.py

DATABASES = {
    "default": {
        # Use "postgresql" or "mysql".
        "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.sqlite3",
        "NAME": f"{os.getcwd()}/db.sqlite3",
        # Database user.
        "USER": "weblate",
        # Name of role to alter to set parameters in PostgreSQL,
        # use in case role name is different than user used for authentication.
        # "ALTER_ROLE": "weblate",
        # Database password.
        "PASSWORD": "",
        # Set to empty string for localhost.
        "HOST": "127.0.0.1",
        # Set to empty string for default.
        "PORT": "",
        # Customizations for databases.
        "OPTIONS": {
            # In case of using an older MySQL server,
            # which has MyISAM as a default storage
            # "init_command": "SET storage_engine=INNODB",
            # Uncomment for MySQL older than 5.7:
            # "init_command": "SET sql_mode='STRICT_TRANS_TABLES'",
            # Set emoji capable charset for MySQL:
            # "charset": "utf8mb4",
            # Change connection timeout in case you get MySQL gone away error:
            # "connect_timeout": 28800,
        },
        # Persistent connections
        "CONN_MAX_AGE": None,
        "CONN_HEALTH_CHECKS": True,
        # Disable server-side cursors, might be needed with pgbouncer
        "DISABLE_SERVER_SIDE_CURSORS": False,
    }
}

And when I run $ weblate runserver, it errors with being unable to create something in /home/weblate

[juliancoffee]

oh, actually, I think using SQLite is even unrelated, it seems the problem was with DATA_DIR, now after changing it to "use this for development purposes" it doesn't trigger this error

[juliancoffee]

oh, I see, I got to actually running migrations to get "unsupported database: sqlite", well, I guess this is it 😅

[juliancoffee]

and looking at the code which throws this exception, I don't think something can be even done about it

[nijel]

Weblate uses database specific full text search features, if something like that exists for SQLite, it should not be that hard to add support for it.