Load Battlesnake data to DuckDB

Battlesnake is a gaming platform where developers build custom web servers to receive and respond to HTTP webhooks that control snake behavior during game matches. Everything needed to build a working Battlesnake → 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 Battlesnake 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 Battlesnake 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 Battlesnake 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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Battlesnake API at a glance

These values come from the Battlesnake API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the Battlesnake API?

Authentication is handled via a Bearer token provided in the request headers. The Battlesnake API expects standard Authorization: Bearer formatting for authorized requests.

1. Get your credentials

Battlesnake does not use a traditional developer API key for its game-engine-to-server communication, as the game engine initiates requests directly to a URL you provide. To manage your Battlesnake, navigate to play.battlesnake.com/account/battlesnakes, create or edit a snake, and register the URL where your server is hosted. For programmatic access to platform data (if using a data integration library), you may need to generate an API token through your account settings or profile dashboard on the Battlesnake website if a specific API feature is supported.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.battlesnake_source]
access_token = "your_bearer_token_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 Battlesnake data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the Battlesnake endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new Battlesnake records?

The Battlesnake API reference does not document a timestamp or sequence field for these endpoints, so there is nothing to advertise here as verified. Pick a field from the endpoints table above that increases with every write, then set it as the cursor_path.

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{"name": "health_check", "endpoint": {
    "path": "/",
    # Replace with a field that increases on every write.
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "REPLACE_ME", "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 Battlesnake pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading /start and /move from the Battlesnake API into DuckDB:

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

@dlt.source
def battlesnake_source(access_token=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://api.battlesnake.com/",
            "auth": {"type": "bearer", "token": access_token},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "health_check", "endpoint": {"path": "/"}},
            {"name": "games", "endpoint": {"path": "/games"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_battlesnake_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="battlesnake_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="battlesnake_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(battlesnake_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_battlesnake_to_duckdb()

Run it with python battlesnake_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 Battlesnake 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("battlesnake_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.health_check.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM battlesnake_data.health_check LIMIT 10;

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

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How do I deploy the Battlesnake 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 Battlesnake 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 Battlesnake 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