Load Pi-hole data to DuckDB

Pi-hole is a network-wide DNS sinkhole that exposes a REST API for programmatic management of blocklists, settings, and query logs through the pihole-FTL binary. Everything needed to build a working Pi-hole → 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 Pi-hole 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 Pi-hole 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 Pi-hole 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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Pi-hole API at a glance

These values come from the Pi-hole API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the Pi-hole API?

Most endpoints require a session ID (SID) obtained by sending a POST request to /api/auth with a password or application password. The SID can be provided via the X-FTL-SID header, as a 'sid' query parameter, in the request body, or as a cookie (the latter requires an additional X-FTL-CSRF header).

1. Get your credentials

The Pi-hole API (v6+) uses a session-based authentication system rather than static tokens. To obtain credentials: 1. Log in to your Pi-hole web dashboard. 2. Navigate to Settings > Web Interface/API. 3. Ensure the interface is in Expert mode. 4. Select Configure app password to generate an application-specific password. 5. Send a POST request to the /api/auth endpoint with a JSON payload containing this password: {"password": "your_app_password"}. 6. The API will return a session ID (SID) in the response, which must be included in subsequent requests via the X-FTL-SID header, as a query parameter (sid), or in the request payload.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.pi_hole_source]
pihole_host = "http://your-pihole-ip"
pihole_app_password = "your-generated-app-password"

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 Pi-hole data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the Pi-hole endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new Pi-hole records?

The Pi-hole 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": "queries", "endpoint": {
    "path": "api/queries",
    # 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 Pi-hole pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading /api/auth and /api/stats/summary from the Pi-hole API into DuckDB:

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

@dlt.source
def pi_hole_source(sid=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "http://pi.hole/api",
            "auth": {"type": "bearer", "token": sid},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "queries", "endpoint": {"path": "api/queries"}},
            {"name": "groups", "endpoint": {"path": "api/groups"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_pi_hole_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="pi_hole_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="pi_hole_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(pi_hole_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_pi_hole_to_duckdb()

Run it with python pi_hole_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 Pi-hole 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("pi_hole_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.queries.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM pi_hole_data.queries LIMIT 10;

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

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How do I deploy the Pi-hole 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 Pi-hole 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 Pi-hole 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