Properly install sqlite3 with FTS5 support

Question

I\'m developing a Python tool which uses a sqlite3 virtual table with FTS5 (Full Text Search). I would like to know how to properly install from a tarball (or any other mean

Answer 1

The easy way is to use apsw (Another Python SQLite Wrapper). Its API is just a little different from sqlite3 and you can't just pip-install it (unless you're okay with outdated version), but the rest is good and you can have the most recent features of SQLite.

wget https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw/releases/download/3.22.0-r1/apsw-3.22.0-r1.zip
unzip apsw-3.22.0-r1.zip
cd apsw-3.22.0-r1
python setup.py fetch --sqlite build --enable-all-extensions install

Then,

import apsw

apsw.Connection(':memory:').cursor().execute('pragma compile_options').fetchall()

Returns:

[('COMPILER=gcc-5.4.0 20160609',),
 ('ENABLE_API_ARMOR',),
 ('ENABLE_FTS3',),
 ('ENABLE_FTS3_PARENTHESIS',),
 ('ENABLE_FTS4',),
 ('ENABLE_FTS5',), 
 ('ENABLE_ICU',),
 ('ENABLE_JSON1',),
 ('ENABLE_RBU',),
 ('ENABLE_RTREE',),
 ('ENABLE_STAT4',),
 ('THREADSAFE=1',)]

The hard way is to compile Python with custom SQLite. More detail in this article by Charles Leifer.