Load SRS data to DuckDB

SRS (Simple Realtime Server) is a high-performance open-source streaming server that provides a RESTful HTTP API to manage server state, streams, and clients. Everything needed to build a working SRS → 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 SRS 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 SRS 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 SRS 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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SRS API at a glance

These values come from the SRS API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

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How do I authenticate with the SRS API?

The SRS (Simple Realtime Server) HTTP API supports HTTP Basic Authentication, which must be enabled in the server configuration. When enabled, credentials are passed using the standard HTTP Authorization header with the 'Basic' scheme followed by a base64-encoded username:password string.

1. Get your credentials

To enable and obtain credentials for the Simple RTMP Server (SRS) HTTP API, you must configure the http_api block in your SRS configuration file (typically srs.conf). Set 'enabled on;' within the 'auth' section and define your 'username' and 'password'. Alternatively, these can be set via environment variables: SRS_HTTP_API_AUTH_ENABLED=on, SRS_HTTP_API_AUTH_USERNAME=<your_username>, and SRS_HTTP_API_AUTH_PASSWORD=<your_password>. Once enabled, authenticate requests using HTTP Basic Authentication by including your credentials in the request header or URL (e.g., http://username:password@localhost:1985/api/v1/...).

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

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[sources.srs_source]
srs_username = "your_username_here"
srs_password = "your_password_here"
srs_api_url = "http://localhost:1985"

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 SRS data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the SRS endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

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How do I load only new SRS records?

The SRS 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": "streams", "endpoint": {
    "path": "api/v1/streams",
    # 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 SRS pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading /api/v1/versions and /api/v1/summaries from the SRS API into DuckDB:

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

@dlt.source
def srs_source(http_api_auth=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "http://<srs-host>:1985/api/v1",
            "auth": {"type": "http_basic", "username": "REPLACE_ME", "password": http_api_auth},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "streams", "endpoint": {"path": "api/v1/streams"}},
            {"name": "clients", "endpoint": {"path": "api/v1/clients"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_srs_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="srs_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="srs_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(srs_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_srs_to_duckdb()

Run it with python srs_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 SRS 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("srs_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.streams.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

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SELECT * FROM srs_data.streams LIMIT 10;

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

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How do I deploy the SRS 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 SRS 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 SRS 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