dlt-unirate

A dlt source for the UniRate API — load live currency exchange rates, the supported-currency list, and per-country VAT rates into any dlt destination (DuckDB, BigQuery, Snowflake, Postgres, filesystem, …).

UniRate provides 593+ fiat, crypto, and commodity exchange rates. Latest rates, currencies, and VAT rates are available on the free tier; historical rates require a Pro plan.

Why this package

dlt has no built-in FX source, so people hand-roll a requests loop or a rest_api config every time they need exchange rates in a warehouse. This package gives you a typed, tested @dlt.source with three resources you can drop straight into a pipeline.

Install

pip install dlt-unirate

This pulls in dlt and requests. Add a destination extra for your target, e.g. pip install "dlt[duckdb]".

Quick start

import dlt
from dlt_unirate import unirate_source

pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
    pipeline_name="unirate",
    destination="duckdb",
    dataset_name="unirate_data",
)

# api_key resolves from dlt secrets / the UNIRATE_API_KEY env var,
# or pass it explicitly: unirate_source(api_key="...").
load_info = pipeline.run(unirate_source(base_currency="USD"))
print(load_info)

That loads three tables: exchange_rates, currencies, and vat_rates.

Configuring the API key

unirate_source follows dlt's config/secrets convention. Any of these work:

• Env var: export UNIRATE_API_KEY="..."

• dlt secrets — .dlt/secrets.toml:

  [sources.unirate]
  api_key = "..."
  

• Explicit argument: unirate_source(api_key="...")

Get a free key at unirateapi.com.

Resources

Source parameters

Historical rates (Pro)

source = unirate_source(
    base_currency="EUR",
    include_historical=True,
    historical_dates=["2024-01-01", "2024-02-01"],
)
pipeline.run(source)

Historical endpoints return HTTP 403 on the free tier (surfaced as ProSubscriptionError); a UniRate Pro plan is required.

Selecting a subset of resources

# Only load exchange rates and currencies.
pipeline.run(unirate_source().with_resources("exchange_rates", "currencies"))

Error handling

Errors raised by the underlying client all inherit from UniRateError:

Related UniRate clients

If you want to call the API directly, there are official clients in Python, Node.js, Go, Rust, Java, Ruby, PHP, .NET, and Swift, plus data-stack integrations for dbt, Airflow, and LangChain.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.