ingestio

Small, composable library for building data ingestion pipelines.

ingestio describes any data movement process as a sequence of steps. It does not assume your data is a table, that your architecture has bronze and silver layers, or that your processing is batch. Those are things you build with it, not things it imposes.

Status: early alpha. The core is functional and tested, the API is not stable yet.

Install

pip install ingestio

No runtime dependencies. An integration that needs one is an optional extra (postgres, s3, gcs, databricks, bigquery), such as pip install 'ingestio[postgres]'.

The idea

Three pieces, and the ordering is always yours:

Steps run in list order, and callbacks inside a step run in list order. There is no priority attribute and no hidden reordering: the sequence you write is the sequence that runs.

The library ships the engine, the connectors (a JSON API reader, a JSON Lines writer, and readers and writers for PostgreSQL, files on disk, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Databricks volumes, Unity Catalog tables and BigQuery) and four generic callbacks: ReadSource reads the source, AppendOnly appends to the target, FullLoad replaces what it holds and SCD2 keeps the history of a dimension. A job names its source and its target in a JSON file, and those callbacks build the matching connector. The stages that are specific to your ingestion are yours to write — that is the point.

Design philosophy

Two concepts, and nothing else: connectors talk to external systems through the Reader and Writer protocols and decide nothing else, and callbacks are the stages that act on the data. The library composes rather than imposes: the smallest abstraction that works, no open registries (the one table maps the configuration's system names to the connectors the library ships), and no dependencies in the core. The full text is in docs/philosophy.md.

Example: a public API into a volume

config.json names the source and the target:

{
  "source": {"system": "json_api", "url": "https://api.example.com/v1/orders"},
  "target": {"system": "json_lines", "path": "/Volumes/main/bronze/orders.jsonl"}
}

main.py only places the callbacks:

from pathlib import Path

from ingestio import AppendOnly, Process, ReadSource, Step

CONFIG = Path(__file__).with_name("config.json")

process = Process([
    Step("extract", [ReadSource(CONFIG)]),
    Step("load", [AppendOnly(CONFIG)]),
]).run()

print(len(process.state["records"]))

AppendOnly adds lines to the file; FullLoad(CONFIG) in its place replaces the file's content. A Databricks volume is an ordinary path, so the same job runs on a laptop and on a cluster.

Writing a callback

A callback is a class with three optional moments. A step runs every before, then every run, then every after, so a callback gets a real boundary around the whole step while keeping list order within each pass.

Callbacks exchange data through process.state instead of passing a payload down a chain, so a callback that only observes does not have to hand the data back.

from datetime import UTC, datetime

from ingestio import Callback


class AddLineageColumns(Callback):
    """Stamp every record with where it came from and which run produced it."""

    def __init__(self, source: str, key: str = "records") -> None:
        self.source = source
        self.key = key

    def run(self) -> None:
        ingested_at = datetime.now(UTC).isoformat()
        self.process.state[self.key] = [
            {
                **record,
                "_ingested_at": ingested_at,
                "_source": self.source,
                "_batch_id": self.process.run_id,
            }
            for record in self.process.state[self.key]
        ]

Drop it into the step where it belongs:

Step("load", [
    AddLineageColumns(source="orders-api"),
    AppendOnly(CONFIG),
])

The column names are yours. ingestio has no opinion about them.

Controlling failure

The library gives you the vocabulary; the policy is yours.

from ingestio import Callback, CancelProcessException


class SkipWhenEmpty(Callback):
    def run(self) -> None:
        if not self.process.state["records"]:
            raise CancelProcessException("nothing to ingest")

• CancelStepException — skip the rest of this step, carry on with the next one.
• CancelProcessException — stop the process cleanly.
• anything else — propagates and kills the run, which is a legitimate choice you make by not catching it.

after runs in every case, so cleanup stays reliable.

Logging

Standard logging, never print, and every line carries the run id — so concurrent ingestions on the same cluster stay readable. A run logs as a tree: the process, each step, and every callback moment that ran, with its outcome and how long it took.

[a3f7c9] ┌ process started · 2 steps
[a3f7c9] │ ┌ extract (1/2) · 1 callback
[a3f7c9] │ │ ✔ ReadSource.run 412ms
[a3f7c9] │ └ extract done in 413ms
[a3f7c9] │ ┌ load (2/2) · 2 callbacks
[a3f7c9] │ │ ✔ AddLineageColumns.run 3ms
[a3f7c9] │ │ ✔ AppendOnly.run 15ms
[a3f7c9] │ └ load done in 19ms
[a3f7c9] └ process finished in 432ms

A failing callback gets a ✖ line at ERROR with the type and message of the exception, and the step and the process close as failed. The exception itself still propagates.

[a3f7c9] │ │ ✖ AppendOnly.run failed after 2ms: PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied
[a3f7c9] │ └ load failed in 3ms
[a3f7c9] └ process failed in 415ms

Nothing shows until logging is configured. To see the tree on the console, opt in with one call:

from ingestio import log_to_console

log_to_console()  # stderr, colored on a terminal; NO_COLOR turns color off

It touches only the ingestio logger. A notebook is not a terminal: pass color=True when it renders ANSI colors. The full format is in docs/concepts/lifecycle.md.

Structuring a job

ingestio does not impose a layout on a job. A suggested minimum is two files:

orders_job/
├── config.json   the job's source, its target and its parameters
└── main.py       places the callbacks and runs the process

config.json names the source and the target of the ingestion. ReadSource reads its source section, and AppendOnly, FullLoad and SCD2 its target section; each builds the connector that the section's system names, with the section's other keys as the connector's arguments. Credentials never go in it.

{
  "source": {"system": "postgres", "table_name": "public.orders", "watermark_column": "updated_at"},
  "target": {"system": "postgres", "table_name": "raw.orders"},
  "primary_key": "id"
}

main.py imports ingestio, places the callbacks the library ships, defines the job's own and runs the process. This one copies the orders changed since the last run from the shop's database into the warehouse:

import os
from datetime import datetime
from pathlib import Path

from ingestio import (
    AppendOnly,
    Callback,
    CancelProcessException,
    Process,
    ReadSource,
    Step,
    log_to_console,
)
from ingestio.connector.all import PostgresConnection

CONFIG = Path(__file__).with_name("config.json")

# Credentials come from the environment; on Databricks, from dbutils.secrets.get.
shop = PostgresConnection(
    "pg.internal", "shop", os.environ["SHOP_USER"], os.environ["SHOP_PASSWORD"]
)
warehouse = PostgresConnection(
    "dw.internal", "warehouse", os.environ["DW_USER"], os.environ["DW_PASSWORD"]
)


def last_watermark() -> datetime | None:
    """The highest `updated_at` already loaded, timezone-aware. None reads every row.

    Yours to write: query the warehouse, read a control table, ...
    """
    return None


class SkipEmptyBatch(Callback):
    """The job's own stage: stop cleanly when nothing changed since the last run."""

    def run(self) -> None:
        if self.process.state["records"].isEmpty():
            raise CancelProcessException("no new orders")


log_to_console()
Process([
    Step("extract", [
        ReadSource(CONFIG, connection=shop, watermark_value=last_watermark()),
    ]),
    Step("load", [
        SkipEmptyBatch(),
        AppendOnly(CONFIG, connection=warehouse),
    ]),
]).run()

• ReadSource and AppendOnly ship with the library; last_watermark and SkipEmptyBatch belong to the job. AppendOnly appends to the target; FullLoad(CONFIG, connection=warehouse) in its place replaces what the target holds.
• The connection, with its credentials, and the run's watermark are arguments of the callbacks, not keys of the file: they are not JSON, and the library reads no secret.
• primary_key is a parameter of the job: the library's callbacks ignore every top-level member other than their own sections, so it is there for the job's own callbacks, such as a merge. The library reserves only source, target and scd2, the section of SCD2's parameters. Inside a section, a key the system does not take is an error, so a typo such as watermark_colum stops the job before anything runs.
• Moving the target is an edit of its section, such as {"system": "unity_catalog", "table_name": "main.bronze.orders"}. An argument the new system does not take is an error too, so that move also drops connection=warehouse.
• Every system, its keys and its arguments are in docs/concepts/configuration.md.

These two files are the whole job, and they run anywhere: in a container, as a Databricks job, on a laptop. The connectors built on Spark, every reader and writer except the JSON ones, expect a Spark session to be running already, and never start one. Databricks provides it; elsewhere, create it before the process runs, for example with SparkSession.builder.getOrCreate(). The rest of the library is plain Python. Some connectors also need their system's extra, such as postgres for the PostgreSQL writer or bigquery for the BigQuery writer; the requirements of each connector are in docs/concepts/connectors.md.

Keeping the history of a dimension

SCD2 writes a dimension, such as customers or products, as a slowly changing dimension of type 2: when a tracked column of an entity changes, it closes the entity's current version and opens a new one, so every past state stays queryable. Its parameters go in an scd2 section of the same file:

{
  "source": {"system": "postgres", "table_name": "public.customers", "watermark_column": "updated_at"},
  "target": {"system": "unity_catalog", "table_name": "main.gold.dim_customer"},
  "scd2": {
    "key_columns": ["customer_id"],
    "effective_time_column": "updated_at",
    "tracked_columns": ["name", "city", "segment"]
  }
}

In main.py, SCD2(CONFIG) takes the place of AppendOnly(CONFIG), with the same arguments.

• Each version carries valid_from and valid_to, taken from the effective-time column; the current version has a null valid_to. Closed versions never change.
• Several records of one entity in a batch each become a version, in the order of their effective time. A record older than the entity's current version fails the run before anything is written.
• An entity absent from the batch keeps its current version: deletes in the source are not detected.
• Every run rewrites the whole dimension, atomically, on unity_catalog, postgres and bigquery. The target must exist before the first run, with the batch's columns plus the two version columns.

The whole behaviour, the checks and the errors are in docs/concepts/callbacks.md, and the scd2 section in docs/concepts/configuration.md.

Roadmap

More connectors (MySQL with change data capture, MongoDB).

License

Apache-2.0