Load Dokku Pro data in Python using dltHub

Build a Dokku Pro-to-database or-dataframe pipeline in Python using dlt with automatic Cursor support.

In this guide, we'll set up a complete Dokku Pro data pipeline from API credentials to your first data load in just 10 minutes. You'll end up with a fully declarative Python pipeline based on dlt's REST API connector, like in the partial example code below:

Example code
@dlt.source
def dokku_pro_source(access_token=dlt.secrets.value):
    config: RESTAPIConfig = {
        "client": {
            "base_url": "https://admin.dokku.me/@api/",
            "auth": {
                "type": "bearer",
                "token": jwt_token,
            },
        },
        "resources": [
            apps, tokens
        ],
    }
    [...]
    yield from rest_api_resources(config)


def get_data() -> None:
    # Connect to destination
    pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
        pipeline_name='dokku_pro_pipeline',
        destination='duckdb',
        dataset_name='dokku_pro_data', 
    )
    # Load the data
    load_info = pipeline.run(dokku_pro_source())
    print(load_info)

Why use dltHub Workspace with LLM Context to generate Python pipelines?

  • Accelerate pipeline development with AI-native context
  • Debug pipelines, validate schemas and data with the integrated Pipeline Dashboard
  • Build Python notebooks for end users of your data
  • Low maintenance thanks to Schema evolution with type inference, resilience and self documenting REST API connectors. A shallow learning curve makes the pipeline easy to extend by any team member
  • dlt is the tool of choice for Pythonic Iceberg Lakehouses, bringing mature data loading to pythonic Iceberg with or without catalogs

What you’ll do

We’ll show you how to generate a readable and easily maintainable Python script that fetches data from dokku_pro’s API and loads it into Iceberg, DataFrames, files, or a database of your choice. Here are some of the endpoints you can load:

  • Apps Management: Create, retrieve, and manage applications with GET and POST endpoints
  • Builder Settings: Configure build settings for specific apps with PATCH operations
  • HTTP Authentication: Manage HTTP auth credentials and access control with PATCH operations
  • Maintenance: Handle maintenance mode and related settings for apps with PATCH operations
  • Scheduler Settings: Configure scheduling parameters and task settings with PATCH operations
  • Tokens: Generate and manage API tokens for authentication with GET and POST endpoints

You will then debug the Dokku Pro pipeline using our Pipeline Dashboard tool to ensure it is copying the data correctly, before building a Notebook to explore your data and build reports.

Setup & steps to follow

💡
Before getting started, let's make sure Cursor is set up correctly:

Now you're ready to get started!

  1. ⚙️ Set up dlt Workspace

    Install dlt with duckdb support:

    pip install dlt[workspace]

    Initialize a dlt pipeline with Dokku Pro support.

    dlt init dlthub:dokku_pro duckdb

    The init command will setup the necessary files and folders for the next step.

  2. 🤠 Start LLM-assisted coding

    Here’s a prompt to get you started:

    Prompt
    Please generate a REST API Source for Dokku Pro API, as specified in @dokku_pro-docs.yaml 
Start with endpoint(s) apps and tokens and skip incremental loading for now. 
Place the code in dokku_pro_pipeline.py and name the pipeline dokku_pro_pipeline. 
If the file exists, use it as a starting point. 
Do not add or modify any other files. 
Use @dlt rest api as a tutorial. 
After adding the endpoints, allow the user to run the pipeline with python dokku_pro_pipeline.py and await further instructions.

  3. 🔒 Set up credentials

    Token-based authentication using JWT. First, exchange username and password via HTTP Basic Auth (curl -u flag) with a POST request to the token endpoint, extracting the JWT from the response. Then use the JWT token in the Authorization header as "Bearer {token}" for subsequent API requests.

Key details: Initial authentication uses HTTP Basic Auth with username and password credentials sent to the token endpoint. The response contains a JWT token in the data.id field. Subsequent requests require the Authorization header with format "Authorization: Bearer {jwt_token}". Content-Type header should be set to application/json for requests.

To get the appropriate API keys, please visit the original source at pro.dokku.com.
If you want to protect your environment secrets in a production environment, look into [setting up credentials with dlt](https://dlthub.com/docs/walkthroughs/add_credentials).

4. 🏃‍♀️ Run the pipeline in the Python terminal in Cursor

```shell
python dokku_pro_pipeline.py
```

If your pipeline runs correctly, you’ll see something like the following:

```shell
Pipeline dokku_pro load step completed in 0.26 seconds
1 load package(s) were loaded to destination duckdb and into dataset dokku_pro_data
The duckdb destination used duckdb:/dokku_pro.duckdb location to store data
Load package 1749667187.541553 is LOADED and contains no failed jobs
```

5. 📈 Debug your pipeline and data with the Pipeline Dashboard

Now that you have a running pipeline, you need to make sure it’s correct, so you do not introduce silent failures like misconfigured pagination or incremental loading errors. By launching the dlt Workspace Pipeline Dashboard, you can see various information about the pipeline to enable you to test it. Here you can see:
- Pipeline overview: State, load metrics
- Data’s schema: tables, columns, types, hints
- You can query the data itself

```shell
dlt pipeline dokku_pro_pipeline show 
```

6. 🐍 Build a Notebook with data explorations and reports

With the pipeline and data partially validated, you can continue with custom data explorations and reports. To get started, paste the snippet below into a new marimo Notebook and ask your LLM to go from there. Jupyter Notebooks and regular Python scripts are supported as well.


```python
import dlt

data = dlt.pipeline("dokku_pro_pipeline").dataset()

get apps table as Pandas frame

data.apps.df().head() ```

Extra resources:

Next steps