LiteCLI - SQLite Client with Autocomplete
Written by Nikos Vaggalis   
Tuesday, 22 January 2019

LiteCLI is a new open source command line client with many good features. Built in Python it is hosted on GitHub.

There are quite a few SQLite GUI clients, such as DB Browser and Sqliteman, but not that many command line/terminal ones.
Despite being command line, the new offering, LiteCLI, is feature rich, including:

  • auto-completion when writing commands and SQL queries
  • auto-suggestion of tables having read the database schema
  • syntax highlighting 
  • saving and re-running favorite queries
  • table output in various formats
  • key bindings for emacs or vi
  • separate configuration file for persistence.

It all makes for a really smooth experience.

Installing it is just as easy. This is the way I'd suggest if you're on Windows:

Open a powershell session as admin and run:

>Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force;
         iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString(
             'https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
 

Then:

>choco install python 

For a better terminal experience than the default cmd.exe, install Hyper which is based on Electron:

>choco install hyper

Open hyper and run:

>pip install -U litecli 

To take it for a test run, let's copy the places.sqlite database, where Firefox keeps the user's bookmarks, history etc to a test folder and run:

>litecli places.sqlite

Now inside the client, we can check the schema and work with the tables, say "moz_places", which can even be chosen from the list of the auto suggestions: 

litecli-autosuggestion

However, because the output of the row exceeds the width of the terminal, it doesn't look that good:


Thankfully LiteCLI has a very nice feature in going vertical :

 

Auto-suggestion aside, there's also Auto-completion:

And if there's a query that you frequently run, you can even save it as favorite and re-run it by just calling it by its nickname:

Another advantage of LiteCLI is that it's also fully customizable. For example you can change the syntax_style of the key bindings:

# Keybindings: Possible values: emacs, vi.
# Emacs mode: Ctrl-A is home, Ctrl-E is end.
 # All emacs keybindings are available in the REPL.

# When Vi mode is enabled you can use modal
 # editing features offered by Vi in the REPL.

key_bindings = emacs 

the table format output as seen when running SQL queries:

# Table format. Possible values: ascii, double, github,
# psql, plain, simple, grid, fancy_grid, pipe, orgtbl,
 # rst, mediawiki, html,# latex, latex_booktabs,
 # textile, moinmoin, jira, vertical, tsv, csv.

# Recommended: ascii
table_format = ascii

and much more.

I had been on the lookout for a good cli alternative like this for quickly running queries on databases stored inside Android emulators. 

It would had certainly come handy at the time I was doing my Android developer Nanodegree Capstone project. I could have  accessed my custom SQLite database simply as:

adb pull data/data/nvglabs.android.com.smartdeviceseeker
       /databases/smadeseek.db & litecli smadeseek.db

 

 

Better late than never!

More Information

LiteCli

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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 22 January 2019 )