Load Danbooru Anime data to DuckDB

Danbooru is an anime imageboard platform providing a REST API for accessing, searching, and managing image posts, tags, and user content. Everything needed to build a working Danbooru Anime → 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 Danbooru Anime 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 Danbooru Anime 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 Danbooru Anime 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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Danbooru Anime API at a glance

These values come from the Danbooru Anime API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the Danbooru Anime API?

Authentication can be performed via HTTP Basic Authentication using the username as the user and the API key as the password, or by passing 'login' and 'api_key' as URL query parameters.

1. Get your credentials

To obtain API credentials for Danbooru, follow these steps: 1. Log in to your account at danbooru.donmai.us. 2. Navigate to your user profile settings (often labeled 'My Account' or found via the profile menu). 3. Locate the 'API Key' section, which is typically found under maintenance or account management pages. 4. Click 'View' to manage your keys. 5. Click the '+ Add' or 'Generate API key' button. 6. Provide a name for the key (this is for your reference) and click 'Create'. 7. Copy the generated API key and store it securely; it acts like a password for programmatic access.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.danbooru_anime_source]
api_key = "REPLACE_ME"

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 Danbooru Anime data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the Danbooru Anime endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new Danbooru Anime records?

Danbooru Anime exposes updated_at on posts.json, 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": "posts", "endpoint": {
    "path": "posts.json",
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "updated_at", "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 Danbooru Anime pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading posts and tags from the Danbooru Anime API into DuckDB:

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

@dlt.source
def danbooru_anime_source(api_key=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://danbooru.donmai.us",
            "auth": {"type": "http_basic", "username": "REPLACE_ME", "password": api_key},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "posts", "endpoint": {"path": "posts.json"}},
            {"name": "tags", "endpoint": {"path": "tags.json"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_danbooru_anime_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="danbooru_anime_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="danbooru_anime_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(danbooru_anime_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_danbooru_anime_to_duckdb()

Run it with python danbooru_anime_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 Danbooru Anime 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("danbooru_anime_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.posts.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM danbooru_anime_data.posts LIMIT 10;

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

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How do I deploy the Danbooru Anime 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 Danbooru Anime 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 Danbooru Anime 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