Load Lightspeed Retail data to DuckDB
Build a Lightspeed Retail to DuckDB pipeline with your coding agent. One prompt scaffolds it with the dltHub AI harness, plus the Lightspeed Retail API base URL, auth, endpoints, and incremental loading.
Lightspeed Retail (X-Series) API provides a secured means to work with retail items such as sales and products on behalf of a retailer account. Everything needed to build a working Lightspeed Retail → 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 Lightspeed Retail to DuckDB pipeline
Paste this prompt into Claude, Codex, or Cursor. The agent does the rest.
PromptRunuvx dlthub-init@latestto build a pipeline from Lightspeed Retail 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 Lightspeed Retail 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.
Lightspeed Retail API at a glance
| Base URL | https://{domain_prefix}.retail.lightspeed.app/api/{version} |
| Example endpoint | GET /api/2026.04/products |
| Records found at | data |
| Authentication | all requests require a Bearer token in the Authorization header — sent in the Authorization header, prefixed Bearer |
| Pagination | Cursor-based via after, page size via page_size. Lightspeed Retail offers multiple APIs. The modern 'X-Series' (formerly Retail POS) and 'V3' APIs primarily use cursor-based pagination via the 'after' parameter. Some specific search endpoints or legacy/OnSite APIs use 'page_size' and 'offset' (or 'count' and 'offset'). For cursor-based endpoints, the cursor is often derived from resource version numbers or returned in the response metadata. |
| Incremental field | version |
| API reference | https://x-series-api.lightspeedhq.com/docs/authorization |
These values come from the Lightspeed Retail API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.
How do I authenticate with the Lightspeed Retail API?
All API requests require an Authorization header with the value 'Bearer {token}', where {token} is either an OAuth 2.0 access token or a personal token.
1. Get your credentials
To obtain API credentials for Lightspeed Retail (X-Series), register your application via the Lightspeed Developer Portal at https://developers.retail.lightspeed.app. Upon registration, you will receive a Client ID and Client Secret, which are used to initiate the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Grant flow. For internal, non-public use cases (Plus plans), you may also generate Personal Tokens by navigating to Setup > Personal tokens within the Retail POS Admin portal.
2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml
[sources.lightspeed_retail_source] lightspeed_client_id = "your_client_id_here" lightspeed_client_secret = "your_client_secret_here" lightspeed_domain_prefix = "your_domain_prefix"
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 Lightspeed Retail data can I load into DuckDB?
These are the Lightspeed Retail endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:
| Resource | Endpoint | Method | Data selector | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| products | /api/{version}/products | GET | data | Retrieve product list |
| customers | /api/{version}/customers | GET | data | Retrieve customer list |
| sales | /api/{version}/sales | GET | data | Retrieve sales transactions |
| inventory | /api/{version}/inventory | GET | data | Retrieve inventory levels |
| outlets | /api/{version}/outlets | GET | data | Retrieve outlet information |
How do I load only new Lightspeed Retail records?
Lightspeed Retail exposes version on /api/2026.04/products, 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.
{"name": "products", "endpoint": { "path": "/api/2026.04/products", "data_selector": "data", "incremental": {"cursor_path": "version", "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 Lightspeed Retail pipeline look like?
A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading token and retailer (or sale) from the Lightspeed Retail API into DuckDB:
import dlt from dlt.sources.rest_api import RESTAPIConfig, rest_api_resources @dlt.source def lightspeed_retail_source(access_token=dlt.secrets.value): config: RESTAPIConfig = { "client": { "base_url": "https://{domain_prefix}.retail.lightspeed.app/api/{version}", "auth": {"type": "bearer", "token": access_token}, }, "resources": [ {"name": "products", "endpoint": {"path": "/api/2026.04/products", "data_selector": "data"}}, {"name": "customers", "endpoint": {"path": "/api/2026.04/customers", "data_selector": "data"}} ], } yield from rest_api_resources(config) def load_lightspeed_retail_to_duckdb() -> None: pipeline = dlt.pipeline( pipeline_name="lightspeed_retail_pipeline", destination="duckdb", dataset_name="lightspeed_retail_data", ) load_info = pipeline.run(lightspeed_retail_source()) print(load_info) if __name__ == "__main__": load_lightspeed_retail_to_duckdb()
Run it with python lightspeed_retail_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 Lightspeed Retail 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("lightspeed_retail_pipeline").dataset() df = data.products.df() print(df.head())
SQL:
SELECT * FROM lightspeed_retail_data.products LIMIT 10;
See querying your data with dataset and exploring it in marimo notebooks.
How do I deploy the Lightspeed Retail 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 Lightspeed Retail 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 Lightspeed Retail 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.
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