Load Clubhouse Data to Azure Cosmos DB Using `dlt` in Python

tip

We will be using the dlt PostgreSQL destination to connect to Azure Cosmos DB. You can get the connection string for your Azure Cosmos DB database as described in the Azure Cosmos DB Docs.

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This page provides technical documentation on loading data from Clubhouse, a social media audio app where users communicate in real-time virtual rooms via audio, into Azure Cosmos DB, a fully managed NoSQL and relational database designed for modern app development. We will utilize the open-source python library dlt to facilitate this process. dlt ensures efficient data extraction, transformation, and loading, allowing seamless integration between Clubhouse and Azure Cosmos DB. For more information about Clubhouse, visit their website.

`dlt` Key Features

Pipeline Metadata: dlt pipelines leverage metadata to provide governance capabilities, including load IDs for data lineage and traceability. Learn more
Schema Enforcement and Curation: dlt empowers users to enforce and curate schemas, ensuring data consistency and quality. Read more
Schema Evolution: Proactive governance with alerts for schema changes, enabling users to review and validate changes. Learn more
Scaling and Finetuning: dlt offers several mechanisms and configuration options to scale up and finetune pipelines. Read more
Databricks Integration: Set up and use Databricks as a destination for your dlt pipelines. Learn more

Getting started with your pipeline locally

OpenAPI Source Generator dlt-init-openapi

This walkthrough makes use of the dlt-init-openapi generator cli tool. You can read more about it here. The code generated by this tool uses the dlt rest_api verified source, docs for this are here.

0. Prerequisites

dlt and dlt-init-openapi requires Python 3.9 or higher. Additionally, you need to have the pip package manager installed, and we recommend using a virtual environment to manage your dependencies. You can learn more about preparing your computer for dlt in our installation reference.

1. Install dlt and dlt-init-openapi

First you need to install the dlt-init-openapi cli tool.

pip install dlt-init-openapi

The dlt-init-openapi cli is a powerful generator which you can use to turn any OpenAPI spec into a dlt source to ingest data from that api. The quality of the generator source is dependent on how well the API is designed and how accurate the OpenAPI spec you are using is. You may need to make tweaks to the generated code, you can learn more about this here.

# generate pipeline
# NOTE: add_limit adds a global limit, you can remove this later
# NOTE: you will need to select which endpoints to render, you 
# can just hit Enter and all will be rendered.
dlt-init-openapi clubhouse --url https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dlt-hub/openapi-specs/main/open_api_specs/Business/clubhouse_api.yaml --global-limit 2
cd clubhouse_pipeline
# install generated requirements
pip install -r requirements.txt

The last command will install the required dependencies for your pipeline. The dependencies are listed in the requirements.txt:

dlt>=0.4.12

You now have the following folder structure in your project:

clubhouse_pipeline/
├── .dlt/
│   ├── config.toml          # configs for your pipeline
│   └── secrets.toml         # secrets for your pipeline
├── rest_api/                # The rest api verified source
│   └── ...
├── clubhouse/                
│   └── __init__.py          # TODO: possibly tweak this file
├── clubhouse_pipeline.py        # your main pipeline script
├── requirements.txt         # dependencies for your pipeline
└── .gitignore               # ignore files for git (not required)

1.1. Tweak clubhouse/init.py

This file contains the generated configuration of your rest_api. You can continue with the next steps and leave it as is, but you might want to come back here and make adjustments if you need your rest_api source set up in a different way. The generated file for the clubhouse source will look like this:

Click to view full file (133 lines)

from typing import List

import dlt
from dlt.extract.source import DltResource
from rest_api import rest_api_source
from rest_api.typing import RESTAPIConfig


@dlt.source(name="clubhouse_source", max_table_nesting=2)
def clubhouse_source(
        base_url: str = dlt.config.value,
) -> List[DltResource]:

    # source configuration
    source_config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": base_url,
            "paginator": {
                "type":
                    "page_number",
                "page_param":
                    "page",
                "total_path":
                    "",
                "maximum_page":
                    20,
            },
        },
        "resources": 
        [
        {
            "name": "check_for_update",
            "table_name": "check_for_update",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/check_for_update",
                "params": {
                    # the parameters below can optionally be configured
                    # "is_testflight": "OPTIONAL_CONFIG",

                },
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "get_actionable_notification",
            "table_name": "get_actionable_notification",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/get_actionable_notifications",
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "get_all_topic",
            "table_name": "get_all_topic",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/get_all_topics",
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "get_channel",
            "table_name": "get_channel",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/get_channels",
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "get_event",
            "table_name": "get_event",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/get_events",
                "params": {
                    # the parameters below can optionally be configured
                    # "is_filtered": "OPTIONAL_CONFIG",
                    # "page_size": "OPTIONAL_CONFIG",

                },
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "get_notification",
            "table_name": "get_notification",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/get_notifications",
                "params": {
                    # the parameters below can optionally be configured
                    # "page_size": "OPTIONAL_CONFIG",

                },
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "get_setting",
            "table_name": "get_setting",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/get_settings",
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "get_suggested_follows_all",
            "table_name": "get_suggested_follows_all",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/get_suggested_follows_all",
                "params": {
                    # the parameters below can optionally be configured
                    # "in_onboarding": "OPTIONAL_CONFIG",
                    # "page_size": "OPTIONAL_CONFIG",

                },
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "get_users_for_topic",
            "table_name": "get_users_for_topic",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/get_users_for_topic",
                "params": {
                    # the parameters below can optionally be configured
                    # "topic_id": "OPTIONAL_CONFIG",
                    # "page_size": "OPTIONAL_CONFIG",

                },
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "get_welcome_channel",
            "table_name": "get_welcome_channel",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/get_welcome_channel",
            }
        },
        ]
    }

    return rest_api_source(source_config)

2. Configuring your source and destination credentials

info

dlt-init-openapi will try to detect which authentication mechanism (if any) is used by the API in question and add a placeholder in your secrets.toml.

If you know your API needs authentication, but none was detected, you can learn more about adding authentication to the rest_api here.
OAuth detection currently is not supported, but you can supply your own authentication mechanism as outlined here.

The dlt cli will have created a .dlt directory in your project folder. This directory contains a config.toml file and a secrets.toml file that you can use to configure your pipeline. The automatically created version of these files look like this:

generated config.toml

[runtime]
log_level="INFO"

[sources.clubhouse]
# Base URL for the API
base_url = "https://www.clubhouseapi.com/api/"

generated secrets.toml

[sources.clubhouse]
# secrets for your clubhouse source
# example_api_key = "example value"

2.1. Adjust the generated code to your usecase

Further help setting up your source and destinations

At this time, the dlt-init-openapi cli tool will always create pipelines that load to a local duckdb instance. Switching to a different destination is trivial, all you need to do is change the destination parameter in clubhouse_pipeline.py to postgres and supply the credentials as outlined in the destination doc linked below.

Read more about setting up the rest_api source in our docs.
Read more about setting up the Azure Cosmos DB destination in our docs.

3. Running your pipeline for the first time

The dlt cli has also created a main pipeline script for you at clubhouse_pipeline.py, as well as a folder clubhouse that contains additional python files for your source. These files are your local copies which you can modify to fit your needs. In some cases you may find that you only need to do small changes to your pipelines or add some configurations, in other cases these files can serve as a working starting point for your code, but will need to be adjusted to do what you need them to do.

The main pipeline script will look something like this:

import dlt

from clubhouse import clubhouse_source


if __name__ == "__main__":
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="clubhouse_pipeline",
        destination='duckdb',
        dataset_name="clubhouse_data",
        progress="log",
        export_schema_path="schemas/export"
    )
    source = clubhouse_source()
    info = pipeline.run(source)
    print(info)

Provided you have set up your credentials, you can run your pipeline like a regular python script with the following command:

python clubhouse_pipeline.py

4. Inspecting your load result

You can now inspect the state of your pipeline with the dlt cli:

dlt pipeline clubhouse_pipeline info

You can also use streamlit to inspect the contents of your Azure Cosmos DB destination for this:

# install streamlit
pip install streamlit
# run the streamlit app for your pipeline with the dlt cli:
dlt pipeline clubhouse_pipeline show

5. Next steps to get your pipeline running in production

One of the beauties of dlt is, that we are just a plain Python library, so you can run your pipeline in any environment that supports Python >= 3.8. We have a couple of helpers and guides in our docs to get you there:

The Deploy section will show you how to deploy your pipeline to

Deploy with GitHub Actions: Learn how to deploy your dlt pipeline using GitHub Actions for automated CI/CD. Follow the guide here.
Deploy with Airflow: Use Google Composer to manage your dlt pipeline with Airflow. Detailed instructions can be found here.
Deploy with Google Cloud Functions: Explore how to deploy your dlt pipeline using Google Cloud Functions. Check out the guide here.
Other Deployment Options: Discover various other methods to deploy your dlt pipeline. More information is available here.

The running in production section will teach you about:

Monitor your pipeline: Learn how to effectively monitor your dlt pipeline to ensure smooth operation and quickly identify any issues. How to Monitor your pipeline
Set up alerts: Implement alerting mechanisms to get notified about any critical events or failures in your dlt pipeline. Set up alerts
Enable tracing: Set up tracing in your dlt pipeline to track the flow of data and diagnose performance issues. And set up tracing

Available Sources and Resources

For this verified source the following sources and resources are available

Source `Clubhouse`

Clubhouse source provides notifications, user suggestions, events, topics, settings, updates, and channels data.

Resource Name	Write Disposition	Description
`get_notification`	`append`	Retrieves notifications for the user.
`get_suggested_follows_all`	`append`	Fetches a list of all suggested users to follow.
`get_event`	`append`	Retrieves details about a specific event.
`get_users_for_topic`	`append`	Gets a list of users associated with a specific topic.
`get_all_topic`	`append`	Retrieves all available topics on the platform.
`get_setting`	`append`	Fetches user settings and preferences.
`get_actionable_notification`	`append`	Retrieves actionable notifications that require user interaction.
`check_for_update`	`append`	Checks if there are any updates available for the app.
`get_channel`	`append`	Retrieves information about a specific audio channel.
`get_welcome_channel`	`append`	Fetches details about the welcome channel for new users.

Load Clubhouse Data to Azure Cosmos DB Using `dlt` in Python

`dlt` Key Features

Getting started with your pipeline locally

0. Prerequisites

1. Install dlt and dlt-init-openapi

1.1. Tweak clubhouse/init.py

2. Configuring your source and destination credentials

generated config.toml

generated secrets.toml

2.1. Adjust the generated code to your usecase

3. Running your pipeline for the first time

4. Inspecting your load result

5. Next steps to get your pipeline running in production

The Deploy section will show you how to deploy your pipeline to

The running in production section will teach you about:

Available Sources and Resources

Source `Clubhouse`

Additional pipeline guides

DHelp

Ask a question

Load Clubhouse Data to Azure Cosmos DB Using dlt in Python

dlt Key Features​

Getting started with your pipeline locally​

0. Prerequisites​

1. Install dlt and dlt-init-openapi​

1.1. Tweak clubhouse/__init__.py​

2. Configuring your source and destination credentials​

generated config.toml​

generated secrets.toml​

2.1. Adjust the generated code to your usecase​

3. Running your pipeline for the first time​

4. Inspecting your load result​

5. Next steps to get your pipeline running in production​

The Deploy section will show you how to deploy your pipeline to​

The running in production section will teach you about:​

Available Sources and Resources​

Source Clubhouse​

Additional pipeline guides​

DHelp

Ask a question

Load Clubhouse Data to Azure Cosmos DB Using `dlt` in Python

`dlt` Key Features

Getting started with your pipeline locally

0. Prerequisites

1. Install dlt and dlt-init-openapi

1.1. Tweak clubhouse/init.py

2. Configuring your source and destination credentials

generated config.toml

generated secrets.toml

2.1. Adjust the generated code to your usecase

3. Running your pipeline for the first time

4. Inspecting your load result

5. Next steps to get your pipeline running in production

The Deploy section will show you how to deploy your pipeline to

The running in production section will teach you about:

Available Sources and Resources

Source `Clubhouse`

Additional pipeline guides