How to Build an ETL App for Contentful Data in Python with CData

The rich ecosystem of Python modules lets you get to work quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. With the CData API Driver for Python and the petl framework, you can build Contentful-connected applications and pipelines for extracting, transforming, and loading Contentful data. This article shows how to connect to Contentful with the CData Python Connector and use petl and pandas to extract, transform, and load Contentful data.

With built-in, optimized data processing, the CData Python Connector offers unmatched performance for interacting with live Contentful data in Python. When you issue complex SQL queries from Contentful, the driver pushes supported SQL operations, like filters and aggregations, directly to Contentful and utilizes the embedded SQL engine to process unsupported operations client-side (often SQL functions and JOIN operations).

Connecting to Contentful Data

Connecting to Contentful data looks just like connecting to any relational data source. Create a connection string using the required connection properties. For this article, you will pass the connection string as a parameter to the create_engine function.

Start by setting the Profile connection property to the location of the Contentful Profile on disk (e.g. C:\profiles\Contentful.apip). Next, set the ProfileSettings connection property to the connection string for Contentful (see below).

Contentful API Profile Settings

Obtain your Content Delivery API access token from your Contentful space settings under Settings > API Keys. Your SpaceId is visible in your Contentful workspace configuration.

After installing the CData Contentful Connector, follow the procedure below to install the other required modules and start accessing Contentful through Python objects.

Install Required Modules

Use the pip utility to install the required modules and frameworks:

pip install petl
pip install pandas

Build an ETL App for Contentful Data in Python

Once the required modules and frameworks are installed, we are ready to build our ETL app. Code snippets follow, but the full source code is available at the end of the article.

First, be sure to import the modules (including the CData Connector) with the following:

import petl as etl
import pandas as pd
import cdata.api as mod

You can now connect with a connection string. Use the connect function for the CData Contentful Connector to create a connection for working with Contentful data.

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\Contentful.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_access_token;SpaceId=your_space_id';")

Create a SQL Statement to Query Contentful

Use SQL to create a statement for querying Contentful. In this article, we read data from the Assets entity.

sql = "SELECT Id, SpaceId FROM Assets WHERE ContentType = 'image/jpeg'"

Extract, Transform, and Load the Contentful Data

With the query results stored in a DataFrame, we can use petl to extract, transform, and load the Contentful data. In this example, we extract Contentful data, sort the data by the SpaceId column, and load the data into a CSV file.

Loading Contentful Data into a CSV File

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

table2 = etl.sort(table1,'SpaceId')

etl.tocsv(table2,'assets_data.csv')

With the CData API Driver for Python, you can work with Contentful data just like you would with any database, including direct access to data in ETL packages like petl.

Free Trial & More Information

Download a free, 30-day trial of the CData API Driver for Python to start building Python apps and scripts with connectivity to Contentful data. Reach out to our Support Team if you have any questions.

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Full Source Code

import petl as etl
import pandas as pd
import cdata.api as mod

cnxn = mod.connect("Profile=C:\profiles\Contentful.apip;ProfileSettings='APIKey=your_access_token;SpaceId=your_space_id';")

sql = "SELECT Id, SpaceId FROM Assets WHERE ContentType = 'image/jpeg'"

table1 = etl.fromdb(cnxn,sql)

table2 = etl.sort(table1,'SpaceId')

etl.tocsv(table2,'assets_data.csv')