Load Feast data to DuckDB
Build a Feast to DuckDB pipeline with your coding agent. One prompt scaffolds it with the dltHub AI harness, plus the Feast API base URL, auth, endpoints, and incremental loading.
Feast is an open-source feature store that provides a REST API server for low-latency feature retrieval and data ingestion operations. Everything needed to build a working Feast → 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.
Build your Feast to DuckDB pipeline
Paste this prompt into Claude, Codex, or Cursor. The agent does the rest.
PromptRunuvx dlthub-init@latestto build a pipeline from Feast 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 Feast 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.
Feast API at a glance
| Base URL | http://localhost:6566 |
| Example endpoint | GET api/v1/entities |
| Authentication | all requests require a Bearer token in the Authorization header — sent in the Authorization header, prefixed Bearer |
| Pagination | Page-number via page, page size via limit (default 50, max 100). Feast list endpoints use traditional page-number pagination: supply page (starts from 1) and limit (max 100). The provided Feast docs do not mention a cursor token field like next_page_token, nor a cursor-style request parameter. |
| API reference | https://docs.feast.dev/reference/feature-servers/registry-server |
These values come from the Feast API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.
How do I authenticate with the Feast API?
The REST API supports Bearer token authentication, which must be provided in the 'Authorization' header with the format 'Bearer '. Feast does not provide built-in authentication, so it is the client's responsibility to manage and pass these tokens to the Feast server.
1. Get your credentials
Feast does not provide a centralized dashboard for generating static API keys. Instead, the Feast Registry and Feature Servers support Bearer token authentication. To obtain credentials, you must configure your identity provider or authentication backend as defined in your specific infrastructure deployment. Once you have a valid token, include it in your HTTP requests using the Authorization header: Authorization: Bearer . If your server is running in a managed environment, refer to your organization's documentation to retrieve the appropriate token.
2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml
[sources.feast_source] api_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.
What Feast data can I load into DuckDB?
These are the Feast endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:
| Resource | Endpoint | Method | Data selector | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| entities | /api/v1/entities | GET | List all entities in the registry | |
| feature_tables | /api/v1/feature-tables | GET | List all feature tables in the registry | |
| feature_services | /api/v1/feature-services | GET | List all feature services in the registry | |
| data_sources | /api/v1/data-sources | GET | List all data sources in the registry | |
| projects | /api/v1/projects | GET | List all projects in the registry |
How do I load only new Feast records?
The Feast 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.
{"name": "entities", "endpoint": { "path": "api/v1/entities", # 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.
What does the generated Feast pipeline look like?
A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading /get-online-features and /push from the Feast API into DuckDB:
import dlt from dlt.sources.rest_api import RESTAPIConfig, rest_api_resources @dlt.source def feast_source(auth=dlt.secrets.value): config: RESTAPIConfig = { "client": { "base_url": "http://localhost:6566", "auth": {"type": "bearer", "token": auth}, }, "resources": [ {"name": "entities", "endpoint": {"path": "api/v1/entities"}}, {"name": "feature_tables", "endpoint": {"path": "api/v1/feature-tables"}} ], } yield from rest_api_resources(config) def load_feast_to_duckdb() -> None: pipeline = dlt.pipeline( pipeline_name="feast_pipeline", destination="duckdb", dataset_name="feast_data", ) load_info = pipeline.run(feast_source()) print(load_info) if __name__ == "__main__": load_feast_to_duckdb()
Run it with python feast_pipeline.py. The agent iterates on this until it loads cleanly — you review and approve, rather than write it from scratch.
How do I query Feast 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):
import dlt data = dlt.pipeline("feast_pipeline").dataset() df = data.entities.df() print(df.head())
SQL:
SELECT * FROM feast_data.entities LIMIT 10;
See querying your data with dataset and exploring it in marimo notebooks.
How do I deploy the Feast 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 Feast loads into governed, documented models.
- Visualize & share — explore data in notebooks and publish live dashboards instead of static screenshots.
What other destinations can I load Feast data to?
dlt loads into any of these — only the destination argument changes:
| Destination | Example value |
|---|---|
| PostgreSQL | "postgres" |
| BigQuery | "bigquery" |
| Snowflake | "snowflake" |
| Redshift | "redshift" |
| Databricks | "databricks" |
| Filesystem (S3, GCS, Azure) | "filesystem" |
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.
Next steps
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