Load Vend data to DuckDB

Lightspeed Retail (X-Series), formerly Vend, is a REST API for managing retail resources such as products, sales, and customers. Everything needed to build a working Vend → 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 Vend 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 Vend 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 Vend 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.

---

Vend API at a glance

These values come from the Vend API reference — the authoritative source if anything here looks out of date.

---

How do I authenticate with the Vend API?

All requests require an Authorization header with a Bearer token: 'Authorization: Bearer '. Personal tokens or OAuth2 access tokens are used.

1. Get your credentials

To authenticate with the Lightspeed Retail (formerly Vend) REST API, you can use either a Personal Access Token for single-retailer access or OAuth2 for applications. For Personal Access Tokens: log in to your Lightspeed Retail account, navigate to your account settings, locate the Personal Tokens section, generate a new token, and copy the value. For OAuth2: register your application in the Lightspeed Developer Portal to obtain a Client ID and Client Secret, then perform the Authorization Code flow to exchange an authorization code for an access token and refresh token via the token endpoint.

2. Add them to .dlt/secrets.toml

Copy
[sources.vend_source]
personal_token = "your_personal_token_here"
client_id = "your_client_id_here"
client_secret = "your_client_secret_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 Vend data can I load into DuckDB?

These are the Vend endpoints dlt can load into DuckDB:

---

How do I load only new Vend records?

Vend exposes version.max on api/2.0/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.

Copy
{"name": "products", "endpoint": {
    "path": "api/2.0/products",
    "data_selector": "data",
    "incremental": {"cursor_path": "version.max", "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 Vend pipeline look like?

A standard dlt REST API pipeline — the same code you would write by hand, loading /api/2.0/products and /api/2.0/sales from the Vend API into DuckDB:

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

@dlt.source
def vend_source(personal_token=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://{domain_prefix}.retail.lightspeed.app/api/2.0",
            "auth": {"type": "bearer", "token": personal_token},
        },
        "resources": [
            {"name": "products", "endpoint": {"path": "api/2.0/products", "data_selector": "data"}},
            {"name": "users", "endpoint": {"path": "api/2.0/users", "data_selector": "data"}}
        ],
    }
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def load_vend_to_duckdb() -> None:
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="vend_pipeline",
        destination="duckdb",
        dataset_name="vend_data",
    )
    load_info = pipeline.run(vend_source())
    print(load_info)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    load_vend_to_duckdb()

Run it with python vend_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 Vend 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):

Copy
import dlt

data = dlt.pipeline("vend_pipeline").dataset()
df = data.products.df()
print(df.head())

SQL:

Copy
SELECT * FROM vend_data.products LIMIT 10;

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

---

How do I deploy the Vend 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 Vend loads into governed, documented models.
• Visualize & share — explore data in notebooks and publish live dashboards instead of static screenshots.

Book a demo →

---

What other destinations can I load Vend 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.

---

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