• Data engineering project template
  • Run Data Pipeline
    • Run on codespaces
    • Run locally
  • Architecture and services in this template
  • Using template
  • Writing pipelines
  • (Optional) Advanced cloud setup
    • Prerequisites:
    • Tear down infra

Data engineering project template

Detailed explanation can be found in this post

Run Data Pipeline

Code available at data_engineering_project_template repository.

Run on codespaces

You can run this data pipeline using GitHub codespaces. Follow the instructions below.

1. Create codespaces by going to the data_engineering_project_template repository, cloning it(or click Use this template button) and then clicking on Create codespaces on main button.
2. Wait for codespaces to start, then in the terminal type make up.
3. Wait for make up to complete, and then wait for 30s (for Airflow to start).
4. After 30s go to the ports tab and click on the link exposing port 8080 to access Airflow UI (username and password is airflow).

Run locally

To run locally, you need:

1. git
2. Github account
3. Docker with at least 4GB of RAM and Docker Compose v1.27.0 or later

Clone the repo and run the following commands to start the data pipeline:

git clone https://github.com/josephmachado/data_engineering_project_template.git
cd data_engineering_project_template
make up
sleep 30 # wait for Airflow to start
make ci # run checks and tests

Go to http:localhost:8080 to see the Airflow UI. Username and password are both airflow.

Architecture and services in this template

This data engineering project template, includes the following:

1. Airflow: To schedule and orchestrate DAGs.
2. Postgres: To store Airflow's details (which you can see via Airflow UI) and also has a schema to represent upstream databases.
3. DuckDB: To act as our warehouse
4. Quarto with Plotly: To convert code in markdown format to html files that can be embedded in your app or servered as is.
5. cuallee: To run data quality checks on the data we extracted from CoinCap API.
6. minio: To provide an S3 compatible open source storage system.

For simplicity services 1-5 of the above are installed and run in one container defined here.

The coincap_elt DAG in the Airflow UI will look like the below image:

You can see the rendered html at ./visualizations/dashboard.html.

The file structure of our repo is as shown below:

Using template

You can use this repo as a template and create your own, click on the Use this template button.

Writing pipelines

We have a sample pipeline at coincap_elt.py that you can use as a starter to create your own DAGs. The tests are available at ./tests folder.

Once the coincap_elt DAG runs, we can see the dashboard html at ./visualization/dashboard.html and will look like .

(Optional) Advanced cloud setup

If you want to run your code on an EC2 instance, with terraform, follow the steps below.

Prerequisites:

1. Terraform
2. AWS account
3. AWS CLI installed and configured

You can create your GitHub repository based on this template by clicking on the `Use this template button in the data_engineering_project_template repository. Clone your repository and replace content in the following files

1. CODEOWNERS: In this file change the user id from @josephmachado to your Github user id.
2. cd.yml: In this file change the data_engineering_project_template part of the TARGET parameter to your repository name.
3. variable.tf: In this file change the default values for alert_email_id and repo_url variables with your email and github repository url respectively.

Run the following commands in your project directory.

# Create AWS services with Terraform
make tf-init # Only needed on your first terraform run (or if you add new providers)
make infra-up # type in yes after verifying the changes TF will make

# Wait until the EC2 instance is initialized, you can check this via your AWS UI
# See "Status Check" on the EC2 console, it should be "2/2 checks passed" before proceeding
# Wait another 5 mins, Airflow takes a while to start up

make cloud-airflow # this command will forward Airflow port from EC2 to your machine and opens it in the browser
# the user name and password are both airflow

make cloud-metabase # this command will forward Metabase port from EC2 to your machine and opens it in the browser
# use https://github.com/josephmachado/data_engineering_project_template/blob/main/env file to connect to the warehouse from metabase

For the continuous delivery to work, set up the infrastructure with terraform, & defined the following repository secrets. You can set up the repository secrets by going to Settings > Secrets > Actions > New repository secret.

1. SERVER_SSH_KEY: We can get this by running terraform -chdir=./terraform output -raw private_key in the project directory and paste the entire content in a new Action secret called SERVER_SSH_KEY.
2. REMOTE_HOST: Get this by running terraform -chdir=./terraform output -raw ec2_public_dns in the project directory.
3. REMOTE_USER: The value for this is ubuntu.

Tear down infra

After you are done, make sure to destroy your cloud infrastructure.

make down # Stop docker containers on your computer
make infra-down # type in yes after verifying the changes TF will make