Load Alpaca Markets data to DuckDB

Alpaca Markets provides REST APIs for automated trading, market data retrieval, and brokerage services. Everything needed to build a working Alpaca Markets → DuckDB pipeline is on this page: the API's base URL, authentication, endpoints, pagination and incremental field — plus a prompt that hands the whole job to your coding agent.

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Build your Alpaca Markets to DuckDB pipeline

Paste this prompt into Claude, Codex, or Cursor. The agent does the rest.

PromptCopy prompt
Run uvx dlthub-init@latest to build a pipeline from Alpaca Markets to DuckDB and run it on dltHub

That scaffolds a dltHub workspace and installs the dltHub AI harness — the project rules, the secrets-management skill, and the dlt MCP server your agent needs to work safely. From there it reads the Alpaca Markets API, proposes the endpoints to load, then writes, runs and validates the pipeline while you review rather than type. Credentials are inspected through MCP tools, so your agent never reads secrets.toml itself. How the LLM-native workflow works →

Prefer to write it yourself? Every fact the agent uses is below.

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Alpaca Markets API at a glance

These values come from the Alpaca Markets API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the Alpaca Markets API?

Alpaca supports two primary authentication methods: header-based authentication using 'APCA-API-KEY-ID' and 'APCA-API-SECRET-KEY' headers for Trading and Market Data APIs, and a Bearer token authentication flow (OAuth2) for Broker API. For Broker API, you must first obtain a short-lived access token by sending a POST request to the token endpoint with client credentials.

1. Get your credentials

Log in to your Alpaca dashboard at app.alpaca.markets. Navigate to the sidebar, locate the API Keys section, and click on Generate New Keys. Copy and securely store both your API Key ID and Secret Key immediately, as the Secret Key will only be displayed once.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.alpaca_markets_source]
ALPACA_API_KEY = "your_api_key_id_here"
ALPACA_SECRET_KEY = "your_api_secret_key_here"

dlt reads this file automatically at runtime. With the harness, the setup-secrets skill prompts you for the values and never handles the raw credential in chat. For production, see setting up credentials with dlt.

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What Alpaca Markets data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the Alpaca Markets endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new Alpaca Markets records?

Alpaca Markets exposes page_token on v2/stocks/quotes, so dlt can request only the records that changed since the last run. Set it as the cursor_path and dlt tracks the high-water mark for you between runs.

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{"name": "quotes", "endpoint": {
    "path": "v2/stocks/quotes",
    "data_selector": "quotes",
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "page_token", "initial_value": "2024-01-01T00:00:00Z"},
}}

On the first run dlt loads everything from initial_value; on every run after that it requests only what changed and appends with write_disposition="merge" if you set a primary key. See incremental loading.

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What does the generated Alpaca Markets pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading /v2/account and /v2/assets from the Alpaca Markets API into DuckDB:

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import dlt
from dlt.sources.rest_api import RESTAPIConfig, rest_api_resources

@dlt.source
def alpaca_markets_source(api_key_api_secret_or_bearer_token=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://api.alpaca.markets (Live Trading), https://paper-api.alpaca.markets (Paper Trading), https://data.alpaca.markets (Market Data)",
            "auth": {"type": "bearer", "token": api_key_api_secret_or_bearer_token},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "quotes", "endpoint": {"path": "v2/stocks/quotes", "data_selector": "quotes"}},
            {"name": "trades", "endpoint": {"path": "v2/stocks/trades", "data_selector": "trades"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_alpaca_markets_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="alpaca_markets_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="alpaca_markets_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(alpaca_markets_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_alpaca_markets_to_duckdb()

Run it with python alpaca_markets_pipeline.py. The agent iterates on this until it loads cleanly — you review and approve, rather than write it from scratch.

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How do I query Alpaca Markets data in DuckDB?

dlt creates one table per resource. Query the loaded data with Python or SQL — or ask your agent to, through the MCP server's execute_sql_query tool.

Python (pandas DataFrame):

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import dlt

data = dlt.pipeline("alpaca_markets_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.quotes.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM alpaca_markets_data.quotes LIMIT 10;

See querying your data with dataset and exploring it in marimo notebooks.

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How do I deploy the Alpaca Markets to DuckDB pipeline in production?

The pipeline runs locally, which is ideal for prototyping and one-off analysis. When you need it on a schedule, monitored on every load, and shared with your team, deploy the same dlt code on the dltHub platform — no infrastructure to maintain. The prompt above already ends with "run it on dltHub", so your agent can take it there directly.

• Deploy & schedule — run the pipeline as a managed job with automatic retries.
• Monitor — observable job queues, alerting, and load metrics for every run.
• Transform — promote raw Alpaca Markets loads into governed, documented models.
• Visualize & share — explore data in notebooks and publish live dashboards instead of static screenshots.

Book a demo →

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What other destinations can I load Alpaca Markets data to?

dlt loads into any of these — only the destination argument changes:

Set dlt.pipeline(destination="snowflake") and add credentials in .dlt/secrets.toml. On the dltHub platform the same pipeline runs against a managed Iceberg lakehouse. See the full destinations list.

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Next steps

• Ready for production? Book a demo of the dltHub platform →
• dlt LLM-native workflow docs
• REST API source reference
• Join the dlt community on Slack