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Loading Data from IFTTT to EDB BigAnimal with dlt in Python

tip

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

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IFTTT (If This Then That) is a web-based service that lets users create automated actions (applets) between different applications and devices. By connecting various services and setting up triggers and actions, IFTTT enables users to automate tasks and streamline workflows. It supports a wide range of integrations, making it a versatile tool for enhancing productivity and connectivity across different platforms and smart devices. EDB BigAnimal is a fully managed database-as-a-service that runs in your cloud account or BigAnimal's cloud account, operated by one of the builders of Postgres. BigAnimal simplifies setting up, managing, and scaling databases, offering options like PostgreSQL or EDB Postgres Advanced Server with Oracle compatibility, and distributed high-availability cluster types. Using the open-source python library dlt, you can efficiently load data from IFTTT to EDB BigAnimal. Further information about the source is available at ifttt.com.

dlt Key Features​

  • Scalability via iterators, chunking, and parallelization: dlt offers scalable data extraction by leveraging iterators, chunking, and parallelization techniques. Learn more
  • Implicit extraction DAGs: dlt incorporates the concept of implicit extraction DAGs to handle the dependencies between data sources and their transformations automatically. Read more
  • Automated maintenance: With schema inference and evolution and alerts, and with short declarative code, maintenance becomes simple. More details
  • Pipeline Metadata: dlt pipelines leverage metadata to provide governance capabilities, including load IDs for incremental transformations and data vaulting. Explore
  • Schema Enforcement and Curation: dlt empowers users to enforce and curate schemas, ensuring data consistency and quality. Find out 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 ifttt_service --url https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dlt-hub/openapi-specs/main/open_api_specs/Business/ifttt_service.yaml --global-limit 2
cd ifttt_service_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:

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

1.1. Tweak ifttt_service/__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 ifttt_service source will look like this:

Click to view full file (53 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="ifttt_service_source", max_table_nesting=2)
def ifttt_service_source(
        api_key: str = dlt.secrets.value,
        base_url: str = dlt.config.value,
) -> List[DltResource]:

    # source configuration
    source_config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": base_url,
            "auth": {
                
            "type": "api_key",
            "api_key": api_key,
            "name": "IFTTT-Service-Key",
            "location": "header"

            },
        },
        "resources": 
        [
        {
            "name": "statu",
            "table_name": "statu",
            "endpoint": {
                "path": "/ifttt/v1/status",
                "paginator": "auto",
            }
        },
        {
            "name": "user_info",
            "table_name": "user_info",
            "primary_key": "id",
            "write_disposition": "merge",
            "endpoint": {
                "data_selector": "data",
                "path": "/ifttt/v1/user/info",
                "paginator": "auto",
            }
        },
        ]
    }

    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.ifttt_service]
# Base URL for the API
base_url = "{scheme}://{hostname}"

generated secrets.toml​


[sources.ifttt_service]
# secrets for your ifttt_service source
api_key = "FILL ME OUT"  # TODO: fill in your credentials

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 ifttt_service_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 EDB BigAnimal 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 ifttt_service_pipeline.py, as well as a folder ifttt_service 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 ifttt_service import ifttt_service_source


if __name__ == "__main__":
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name="ifttt_service_pipeline",
        destination='duckdb',
        dataset_name="ifttt_service_data",
        progress="log",
        export_schema_path="schemas/export"
    )
    source = ifttt_service_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 ifttt_service_pipeline.py

4. Inspecting your load result​

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

dlt pipeline ifttt_service_pipeline info

You can also use streamlit to inspect the contents of your EDB BigAnimal destination for this:

# install streamlit
pip install streamlit
# run the streamlit app for your pipeline with the dlt cli:
dlt pipeline ifttt_service_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 pipeline using GitHub Actions, a CI/CD runner that you can use for free. Follow the guide here.
  • Deploy with Airflow: Use Google Composer, a managed Airflow environment provided by Google, to deploy your pipeline. Follow the detailed instructions here.
  • Deploy with Google Cloud Functions: Discover how to deploy your pipeline using Google Cloud Functions for a serverless deployment. Learn more here.
  • Explore other deployment options: Find various other methods and platforms to deploy your dlt pipeline. Check out the comprehensive guide here.

The running in production section will teach you about:​

  • How to Monitor your pipeline: Learn how to effectively monitor your dlt pipeline to ensure it runs smoothly and efficiently. How to Monitor your pipeline
  • Set up alerts: Set up alerts to get notified about any issues or important events in your dlt pipeline, ensuring timely responses to potential problems. Set up alerts
  • Set up tracing: Implement tracing to gain detailed insights into the execution of your dlt pipeline, helping you diagnose and resolve issues quickly. And set up tracing

Available Sources and Resources​

For this verified source the following sources and resources are available

Source IFTTT​

Fetches user data and status updates from IFTTT for automation and integration purposes.

Resource NameWrite DispositionDescription
user_infoappendInformation about the user
statuappendStatus updates or logs related to applet actions

Additional pipeline guides​

This demo works on codespaces. Codespaces is a development environment available for free to anyone with a Github account. You'll be asked to fork the demo repository and from there the README guides you with further steps.
The demo uses the Continue VSCode extension.

Off to codespaces!

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