Load Mixpanel data to DuckDB
Build a Mixpanel to DuckDB pipeline with your coding agent. One prompt scaffolds it with the dltHub AI harness, plus the Mixpanel API base URL, auth, endpoints, and incremental loading.
Mixpanel provides APIs for querying, exporting, and ingesting data including user profile, event, and metadata management. Everything needed to build a working Mixpanel → 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 Mixpanel to DuckDB pipeline
Paste this prompt into Claude, Codex, or Cursor. The agent does the rest.
PromptRunuvx dlthub-init@latestto build a pipeline from Mixpanel 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 Mixpanel 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.
Mixpanel API at a glance
| Base URL | https://mixpanel.com/api (Query API standard) or https://api.mixpanel.com (Ingestion API standard) |
| Example endpoint | GET engage |
| Records found at | results |
| Authentication | All requests require HTTP Basic Authentication — sent in the Authorization header, prefixed Bearer |
| Pagination | Cursor-based via cursor, page size via page_size. Mixpanel uses two distinct pagination styles. The App API (e.g., /projects/{id}/dashboards) uses cursor-based pagination with 'cursor' and 'page_size' parameters. The Engage Query API (/engage) uses session-based pagination requiring both 'session_id' and 'page' (zero-indexed) parameters. |
| Incremental field | next_cursor |
| Record id | $distinct_id |
| API reference | https://developer.mixpanel.com/reference/authentication |
These values come from the Mixpanel API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.
How do I authenticate with the Mixpanel API?
Mixpanel uses HTTP Basic Authentication where the username and secret are provided; the API accepts both raw text and base64-encoded credentials in the Authorization header.
1. Get your credentials
To obtain Service Account credentials (recommended): 1. Log in to Mixpanel. 2. Navigate to your Organization Settings. 3. Click the Service Accounts tab. 4. Click to create a new service account, ensuring you assign the necessary roles (Admin/Owner) for the required project/workspace scope. 5. Copy the Service Account username and secret immediately, as they will not be displayed again.
2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml
[sources.mixpanel_source] username = "your_service_account_username" secret = "your_service_account_secret"
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 Mixpanel data can I load into DuckDB?
These are the Mixpanel endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:
| Resource | Endpoint | Method | Data selector | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| engage | /engage | GET | results | Retrieve user or group profiles |
| insights | /insights | GET | Query saved Insights reports | |
| event_properties | /events/properties | GET | Aggregated event property values | |
| schemas_by_entity | /projects/{projectId}/schemas/{entityType} | GET | List all schemas for an entity type | |
| schema_by_name | /projects/{projectId}/schemas/{entityType}/{name} | GET | Get schema for a specific entity |
How do I load only new Mixpanel records?
Mixpanel exposes next_cursor on engage, 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": "engage", "endpoint": { "path": "engage", "data_selector": "results", "incremental": {"cursor_path": "next_cursor", "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 Mixpanel pipeline look like?
A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading query and import from the Mixpanel API into DuckDB:
import dlt from dlt.sources.rest_api import RESTAPIConfig, rest_api_resources @dlt.source def mixpanel_source(username_or_secret_depending_on_implementation_often_mapped_to_service_account_username_and_service_account_secret=dlt.secrets.value): config: RESTAPIConfig = { "client": { "base_url": "https://mixpanel.com/api (Query API standard) or https://api.mixpanel.com (Ingestion API standard)", "auth": {"type": "http_basic", "username": "REPLACE_ME", "password": username_or_secret_depending_on_implementation_often_mapped_to_service_account_username_and_service_account_secret}, }, "resources": [ {"name": "engage", "endpoint": {"path": "engage", "data_selector": "results"}}, {"name": "schemas_by_entity", "endpoint": {"path": "projects/{projectId}/schemas/{entityType}", "data_selector": "schemas"}} ], } yield from rest_api_resources(config) def load_mixpanel_to_duckdb() -> None: pipeline = dlt.pipeline( pipeline_name="mixpanel_pipeline", destination="duckdb", dataset_name="mixpanel_data", ) load_info = pipeline.run(mixpanel_source()) print(load_info) if __name__ == "__main__": load_mixpanel_to_duckdb()
Run it with python mixpanel_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 Mixpanel 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("mixpanel_pipeline").dataset() df = data.engage.df() print(df.head())
SQL:
SELECT * FROM mixpanel_data.engage LIMIT 10;
See querying your data with dataset and exploring it in marimo notebooks.
How do I deploy the Mixpanel 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 Mixpanel 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 Mixpanel 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
Was this page helpful?
Community Hub
Need more dlt context for Mixpanel to DuckDB?
Request dlt skills, commands, AGENT.md files, and AI-native context.