Simon Willison Releases datasette-auth-github 1.0

Developer Simon Willison has officially launched version 1.0 of datasette-auth-github, a stable release of the plugin designed to authenticate Datasette users via their GitHub credentials. The milestone release marks a transition to a fully supported, production-ready tool for developers seeking to secure their Datasette instances.

The update directly addresses a session persistence issue that Willison discovered while running the plugin on his agent.datasette.io demo site. Previously, authenticated user sessions were expiring prematurely, a problem that was especially pronounced on Mobile Safari where browser sessions frequently close independently of active use. The root cause was identified as a missing Max-Age parameter on the authentication cookies, which caused them to expire immediately when a browser session ended. This bug was resolved in pull request number 80.

With the session bug resolved, the plugin has been thoroughly tested and verified to work seamlessly with both Datasette 0.65.x and the upcoming Datasette 1.0ax. Because the plugin has maintained a stable track record over a long period, Willison decided to bump the version to 1.0, reflecting a broader effort to promote mature plugins in the ecosystem to official stable releases.

For practitioners utilizing Datasette for data exploration and publishing, the 1.0 designation signals that the authentication workflow is robust enough for deployment in production environments. By ensuring that users do not have to repeatedly log in when switching tasks or reopening mobile browsers, the update significantly improves the user experience for secure data portals.