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Filesystem & buckets

Filesystem destination stores data in remote file systems and bucket storages like S3, google storage or azure blob storage. Underneath, it uses fsspec to abstract file operations. Its primary role is to be used as a staging for other destinations, but you can also quickly build a data lake with it.

💡 Please read the notes on the layout of the data files. Currently, we are getting feedback on it. Please join our Slack (icon at the top of the page) and help us find the optimal layout.

Install dlt with filesystem​

To install the DLT library with filesystem dependencies:

pip install dlt[filesystem]

This installs s3fs and botocore packages.

caution

You may also install the dependencies independently. Try:

pip install dlt
pip install s3fs

so pip does not fail on backtracking.

Setup Guide​

1. Initialise the dlt project​

Let's start by initialising a new dlt project as follows:

dlt init chess filesystem

💡 This command will initialise your pipeline with chess as the source and the AWS S3 filesystem as the destination.

2. Set up bucket storage and credentials​

AWS S3​

The command above creates sample secrets.toml and requirements file for AWS S3 bucket. You can install those dependencies by running:

pip install -r requirements.txt

To edit the dlt credentials file with your secret info, open .dlt/secrets.toml, which looks like this:

[destination.filesystem]
bucket_url = "s3://[your_bucket_name]" # replace with your bucket name,

[destination.filesystem.credentials]
aws_access_key_id = "please set me up!" # copy the access key here
aws_secret_access_key = "please set me up!" # copy the secret access key here

If you have your credentials stored in ~/.aws/credentials just remove the [destination.filesystem.credentials] section above and dlt will fall back to your default profile in local credentials. If you want to switch the profile, pass the profile name as follows (here: dlt-ci-user):

[destination.filesystem.credentials]
profile_name="dlt-ci-user"

You can also pass an AWS region:

[destination.filesystem.credentials]
region_name="eu-central-1"

You need to create a S3 bucket and a user who can access that bucket. dlt is not creating buckets automatically.

  1. You can create the S3 bucket in the AWS console by clicking on "Create Bucket" in S3 and assigning the appropriate name and permissions to the bucket.

  2. Once the bucket is created, you'll have the bucket URL. For example, If the bucket name is dlt-ci-test-bucket, then the bucket URL will be:

    s3://dlt-ci-test-bucket

  3. To grant permissions to the user being used to access the S3 bucket, go to the IAM > Users, and click on “Add Permissions”.

  4. Below you can find a sample policy that gives a minimum permission required by dlt to a bucket we created above. The policy contains permissions to list files in a bucket, get, put and delete objects. Remember to place your bucket name in Resource section of the policy!

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "DltBucketAccess",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:DeleteObject",
                "s3:GetObjectAttributes",
                "s3:ListBucket"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::dlt-ci-test-bucket/*",
                "arn:aws:s3:::dlt-ci-test-bucket"
            ]
        }
    ]
}
  1. To grab the access and secret key for the user. Go to IAM > Users and in the “Security Credentials”, click on “Create Access Key”, and preferably select “Command Line Interface” and create the access key.
  2. Grab the “Access Key” and “Secret Access Key” created that are to be used in "secrets.toml".
Using S3 compatible storage​

To use an S3 compatible storage other than AWS S3 like MinIO or Cloudflare R2 you may supply an endpoint_url in the config. This should be set along with aws credentials:

[destination.filesystem]
bucket_url = "s3://[your_bucket_name]" # replace with your bucket name,

[destination.filesystem.credentials]
aws_access_key_id = "please set me up!" # copy the access key here
aws_secret_access_key = "please set me up!" # copy the secret access key here
endpoint_url = "https://<account_id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com" # copy your endpoint URL here
Adding Additional Configuration​

To pass any additional arguments to fsspec, you may supply kwargs and client_kwargs in the config as a stringified dictionary:

[destination.filesystem]
kwargs = '{"use_ssl": true}'
client_kwargs = '{"verify": "public.crt"}'

Google Storage​

Run pip install dlt[gs] which will install gcfs package.

To edit the dlt credentials file with your secret info, open .dlt/secrets.toml. You'll see AWS credentials by default. Use Google cloud credentials that you may know from BigQuery destination

[destination.filesystem]
bucket_url = "gs://[your_bucket_name]" # replace with your bucket name,

[destination.filesystem.credentials]
project_id = "project_id" # please set me up!
private_key = "private_key" # please set me up!
client_email = "client_email" # please set me up!

💡 Note that you can share the same credentials with BigQuery, replace the [destination.filesystem.credentials] section with less specific one: [destination.credentials] which applies to both destinations

if you have default google cloud credentials in your environment (i.e. on cloud function) remove the credentials sections above and dlt will fall back to the available default.

Use Cloud Storage admin to create a new bucket. Then assign the Storage Object Admin role to your service account.

Azure Blob Storage​

Run pip install dlt[az] which will install the adlfs package to interface with Azure Blob Storage.

Edit the credentials in .dlt/secrets.toml, you'll see AWS credentials by default replace them with your Azure credentials:

[destination.filesystem]
bucket_url = "az://[your_container name]" # replace with your container name

[destination.filesystem.credentials]
# The storage account name is always required
azure_storage_account_name = "account_name" # please set me up!
# You can set either account_key or sas_token, only one is needed
azure_storage_account_key = "account_key" # please set me up!
azure_storage_sas_token = "sas_token" # please set me up!

If you have the correct Azure credentials set up on your machine (e.g. via azure cli), you can omit both azure_storage_account_key and azure_storage_sas_token and dlt will fall back to the available default. Note that azure_storage_account_name is still required as it can't be inferred from the environment.

Local file system​

If for any reason you want to have those files in local folder, set up the bucket_url as follows (you are free to use config.toml for that as there are no secrets required)

[destination.filesystem]
bucket_url = "file:///absolute/path"  # three / for absolute path
# bucket_url = "file://relative/path" # two / for a relative path

Write disposition​

filesystem destination handles the write dispositions as follows:

  • append - files belonging to such tables are added to dataset folder
  • replace - all files that belong to such tables are deleted from dataset folder, and then the current set of files is added.
  • merge - falls back to append

File Compression​

The filesystem destination in the dlt library uses gzip compression by default for efficiency, which may result in the files being stored in a compressed format. This format may not be easily readable as plain text or JSON Lines (jsonl) files. If you encounter files that seem unreadable, they may be compressed.

To handle compressed files:

  • To disable compression, you can modify the data_writer.disable_compression setting in your "config.toml" file. This can be useful if you want to access the files directly without needing to decompress them. For example:

    [normalize.data_writer]
    disable_compression=true

  • To decompress a gzip file, you can use tools like gunzip. This will convert the compressed file back to its original format, making it readable.

For more details on managing file compression, please visit our documentation on performance optimization: Disabling and Enabling File Compression.

Data loading​

All the files are stored in a single folder with the name of the dataset that you passed to the run or load methods of pipeline. In our example chess pipeline it is chess_players_games_data.

💡 Note that bucket storages are in fact key-blob storage so folder structure is emulated by splitting file names into components by /.

Files layout​

The name of each file contains essential metadata on the content:

  • schema_name and table_name identify the schema and table that define the file structure (column names, data types, etc.)
  • load_id is the id of the load package form which the file comes from.
  • file_id is there are many files with data for a single table, they are copied with different file id.
  • ext a format of the file i.e. jsonl or parquet

Current default layout: {table_name}/{load_id}.{file_id}.{ext}`

💡 Note that the default layout format has changed from {schema_name}.{table_name}.{load_id}.{file_id}.{ext} to {table_name}/{load_id}.{file_id}.{ext} in dlt 0.3.12. You can revert to the old layout by setting the old value in your toml file.

You can change the file name format by providing the layout setting for the filesystem destination like so:

[destination.filesystem]
layout="{table_name}/{load_id}.{file_id}.{ext}" # current preconfigured naming scheme
# layout="{schema_name}.{table_name}.{load_id}.{file_id}.{ext}" # naming scheme in dlt 0.3.11 and earlier

A few things to know when specifying your filename layout:

  • If you want a different base path that is common to all filenames, you can suffix your bucket_url rather than prefix your layout setting.
  • If you do not provide the {ext} placeholder, it will automatically be added to your layout at the end with a dot as separator.
  • It is the best practice to have a separator between each placeholder. Separators can be any character allowed as a filename character, but dots, dashes and forward slashes are most common.
  • When you are using the replace disposition, `dlt`` will have to be able to figure out the correct files to delete before loading the new data. For this to work, you have to
    • include the {table_name} placeholder in your layout
    • not have any other placeholders except for the {schema_name} placeholder before the table_name placeholder and
    • have a separator after the table_name placeholder

Please note:

  • dlt will not dump the current schema content to the bucket
  • dlt will mark complete loads by creating an empty file that corresponds to _dlt_loads table. For example, if chess._dlt_loads.1685299832 file is present in dataset folders, you can be sure that all files for the load package 1685299832 are completely loaded

Supported file formats​

You can choose the following file formats:

Syncing of dlt state​

This destination does not support restoring the dlt state. You can change that by requesting the feature or contributing to the core library 😄 You can however easily backup and restore the pipeline working folder - reusing the bucket and credentials used to store files.

Additional Setup 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!

DHelp

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