Source

A source is a logical grouping of resources i.e. endpoints of a single API. The most common approach is to define it in a separate Python module.

• A source is a function decorated with @dlt.source that returns one or more resources.
• A source can optionally define a schema with tables, columns, performance hints and more.
• The source Python module typically contains optional customizations and data transformations.
• The source Python module typically contains the authentication and pagination code for particular API.

Declare sources

You declare source by decorating an (optionally async) function that return or yields one or more resource with dlt.source. Our Create a pipeline how to guide teaches you how to do that.

Create resources dynamically

You can create resources by using dlt.resource as a function. In an example below we reuse a single generator function to create a list of resources for several Hubspot endpoints.

@dlt.source
def hubspot(api_key=dlt.secrets.value):

    endpoints = ["companies", "deals", "product"]

    def get_resource(endpoint):
        yield requests.get(url + "/" + endpoint).json()

    for endpoint in endpoints:
        # calling get_resource creates generator,
        # the actual code of the function will be executed in pipeline.run
        yield dlt.resource(get_resource(endpoint), name=endpoint)

Attach and configure schemas

You can create, attach and configure schema that will be used when loading the source.

Avoid long lasting operations in source function

Do not extract data in source function. Leave that task to your resources if possible. Source function is executed immediately when called (contrary to resources which delay execution - like Python generators). There are several benefits (error handling, execution metrics, parallelization) you get when you extract data in pipeline.run or pipeline.extract.

If this is impractical (for example you want to reflect a database to create resources for tables) make sure you do not call source function too often. See this note if you plan to deploy on Airflow

Customize sources

Access and select resources to load

You can access resources present in a source and select which of them you want to load. In case of hubspot resource above we could select and load "companies", "deals" and "products" resources:

from hubspot import hubspot

source = hubspot()
# "resources" is a dictionary with all resources available, the key is the resource name
print(source.resources.keys())  # print names of all resources
# print resources that are selected to load
print(source.resources.selected.keys())
# load only "companies" and "deals" using "with_resources" convenience method
pipeline.run(source.with_resources("companies", "deals"))

Resources can be individually accessed and selected:

# resources are accessible as attributes of a source
for c in source.companies:  # enumerate all data in companies resource
    print(c)

# check if deals are selected to load
print(source.deals.selected)
# deselect the deals
source.deals.selected = False

Filter, transform and pivot data

You can modify and filter data in resources, for example if we want to keep only deals after certain date:

source.deals.add_filter(lambda deal: deal["created_at"] > yesterday)

Find more on transforms here.

Load data partially

You can limit the number of items produced by each resource by calling a add_limit method on a source. This is useful for testing, debugging and generating sample datasets for experimentation. You can easily get your test dataset in a few minutes, when otherwise you'd need to wait hours for the full loading to complete. Below we limit the pipedrive source to just get 10 pages of data from each endpoint. Mind that the transformers will be evaluated fully:

from pipedrive import pipedrive_source

pipeline = dlt.pipeline(pipeline_name='pipedrive', destination='duckdb', dataset_name='pipedrive_data')
load_info = pipeline.run(pipedrive_source().add_limit(10))
print(load_info)

note

Note that add_limit does not limit the number of records but rather the "number of yields". dlt will close the iterator/generator that produces data after the limit is reached.

Find more on sampling data here.

Add more resources to existing source

You can add a custom resource to source after it was created. Imagine that you want to score all the deals with a keras model that will tell you if the deal is a fraud or not. In order to do that you declare a new transformer that takes the data from deals resource and add it to the source.

import dlt
from hubspot import hubspot

# source contains `deals` resource
source = hubspot()

@dlt.transformer
def deal_scores(deal_item):
    # obtain the score, deal_items contains data yielded by source.deals
    score = model.predict(featurize(deal_item))
    yield {"deal_id": deal_item, "score": score}

# connect the data from `deals` resource into `deal_scores` and add to the source
source.resources.add(source.deals | deal_scores)
# load the data: you'll see the new table `deal_scores` in your destination!
pipeline.run(source)

You can also set the resources in the source as follows

source.deal_scores = source.deals | deal_scores

or

source.resources["deal_scores"] = source.deals | deal_scores

note

When adding resource to the source, dlt clones the resource so your existing instance is not affected.

Reduce the nesting level of generated tables

You can limit how deep dlt goes when generating child tables. By default, the library will descend and generate child tables for all nested lists, without limit.

@dlt.source(max_table_nesting=1)
def mongo_db():
    ...

In the example above we want only 1 level of child tables to be generates (so there are no child tables of child tables). Typical settings:

• max_table_nesting=0 will not generate child tables at all and all nested data will be represented as json.
• max_table_nesting=1 will generate child tables of top level tables and nothing more. All nested data in child tables will be represented as json.

You can achieve the same effect after the source instance is created:

from mongo_db import mongo_db

source = mongo_db()
source.max_table_nesting = 0

Several data sources are prone to contain semi-structured documents with very deep nesting i.e. MongoDB databases. Our practical experience is that setting the max_nesting_level to 2 or 3 produces the clearest and human-readable schemas.

tip

The max_table_nesting parameter at the source level doesn't automatically apply to individual resources when accessed directly (e.g., using source.resources["resource_1"]). To make sure it works, either use source.with_resources("resource_1") or set the parameter directly on the resource.

You can directly configure the max_table_nesting parameter on the resource level as:

@dlt.resource(max_table_nesting=0)
def my_resource():
    ...

or

my_source = source()
my_source.my_resource.max_table_nesting = 0

Modify schema

The schema is available via schema property of the source. You can manipulate this schema i.e. add tables, change column definitions etc. before the data is loaded.

Source provides two other convenience properties:

1. max_table_nesting to set the maximum nesting level of child tables
2. root_key to propagate the _dlt_id of from a root table to all child tables.

Load sources

You can pass individual sources or list of sources to the dlt.pipeline object. By default, all the sources will be loaded to a single dataset.

You are also free to decompose a single source into several ones. For example, you may want to break down a 50 table copy job into an airflow dag with high parallelism to load the data faster. To do so, you could get the list of resources as:

# get a list of resources' names
resource_list = sql_source().resources.keys()

#now we are able to make a pipeline for each resource
for res in resource_list:
    pipeline.run(sql_source().with_resources(res))

Do a full refresh

You can temporarily change the "write disposition" to replace on all (or selected) resources within a source to force a full refresh:

p.run(merge_source(), write_disposition="replace")

With selected resources:

p.run(tables.with_resources("users"), write_disposition="replace")