3-define-inputs.md

Step 3: Define Inputs

Each connector declares the inputs it needs to read data from the underlying data source. This is the Airbyte Protocol's spec operation.

The simplest way to implement this is by creating a .json file in source_<name>/spec.json which describes your connector's inputs according to the ConnectorSpecification schema. This is a good place to start when developing your source. Using JsonSchema, define what the inputs are (e.g. username and password). Here's an example of what the spec.json looks like for the Freshdesk API source.

For more details on what the spec is, you can read about the Airbyte Protocol here.

The generated code that Airbyte provides, handles implementing the spec method for you. It assumes that there will be a file called spec.json in the same directory as source.py. If you have declared the necessary JsonSchema in spec.json you should be done with this step.

Given that we'll pulling currency data for our example source, we'll define the following spec.json:

{
  "documentationUrl": "https://docs.airbyte.io/integrations/sources/exchangeratesapi",
  "connectionSpecification": {
    "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-07/schema#",
    "title": "Python Http Tutorial Spec",
    "type": "object",
    "required": ["start_date", "base"],
    "additionalProperties": false,
    "properties": {
      "start_date": {
        "type": "string",
        "description": "Start getting data from that date.",
        "pattern": "^[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}$",
        "examples": ["%Y-%m-%d"]
      },
      "base": {
        "type": "string",
        "examples": ["USD", "EUR"],
        "description": "ISO reference currency. See <a href=\"https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/policy_and_exchange_rates/euro_reference_exchange_rates/html/index.en.html\">here</a>."
      }
    }
  }
}

In addition to metadata, we define two inputs:

• start_date: The beginning date to start tracking currency exchange rates from
• base: The currency whose rates we're interested in tracking