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Environment

Sling looks for connection credentials in several places:
One of the easiest ways is to manage your connections is to use the sling conns sub-command. Follow in the next section.

Managing Connections

Sling makes it easy to set, list and test connections. You can even see the available streams in a connection by using the discover sub-command.
$ sling conns -h
conns - Manage local connections
See more details at https://docs.slingdata.io/sling-cli/
Usage:
conns [discover|list|set|test]
Subcommands:
discover list available streams in connection
list list local connections detected
set set a connection in the sling env file
test test a local connection
Flags:
--version Displays the program version string.
-h --help Displays help with available flag, subcommand, and positional value parameters.

Set Connections

Here we can easily set a connection with the sling conns set command and later refer to them by their name. This ensures credentials are not visible by other users when using process monitors, for example.
# set a connection by providing the key=value pairs
$ sling conns set AWS_S3 type=s3 bucket=sling-bucket access_key_id=ACCESS_KEY_ID secret_access_key="SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"
# we set a database connection with just the url
$ sling conns set MY_PG url='postgresql://postgres:myPassword@pghost:5432/postgres'
To see what credential keys are necessary/accepted for each type of connector, click below:
  • File/Storage Connections (see here)
  • Database Connections (see here)

List Connections

Once connections are set, we can run the sling conns list command to list our detected connections:
$ sling conns list
+--------------------------+-----------------+-------------------+
| CONN NAME | CONN TYPE | SOURCE |
+--------------------------+-----------------+-------------------+
| AWS_S3 | FileSys - S3 | sling env yaml |
| FINANCE_BQ | DB - BigQuery | sling env yaml |
| DO_SPACES | FileSys - S3 | sling env yaml |
| LOCALHOST_DEV | DB - PostgreSQL | dbt profiles yaml |
| MSSQL | DB - SQLServer | sling env yaml |
| MYSQL | DB - MySQL | sling env yaml |
| ORACLE_DB | DB - Oracle | env variable |
| MY_PG | DB - PostgreSQL | sling env yaml |
+--------------------------+-----------------+-------------------+

Test Connections

We can also test a connection by running the sling conns test command:
$ sling conns test LOCALHOST_DEV
9:04AM INF success!

Discover Connections

We can easily discover streams available in a connection with the sling conns discover command:
$ sling conns discover LOCALHOST_DEV
9:05AM INF Found 344 streams:
- "public"."accounts"
- "public"."bills"
- "public"."connections"
...

Credentials Location

Sling Env File (env.yaml)

The Sling Env file is the primary way sling reads conenctions. It needs to be saved in the path ~/.sling/env.yaml where the ~ denotes the path of the user Home folder, which can have different locations depending on the operating system (see here for Windows, here for Mac and here for Linux). Sling automatically creates the .sling folder in the user home directory, which is typically as shown below:
  • Linux: /home/<username>/.sling, or /root/.sling if user is root
  • Mac: /Users/<username>/.sling
  • Windows: C:\Users\<username>\.sling
Once in the user home directory, setting the Sling Env File (named env.yaml) is easy, and adheres to the structure below. Running sling the first time will auto-create it.
To see what credential keys are necessary/accepted for each type of connector, click below:
  • File/Storage Connections (see here)
  • Database Connections (see here)
# Holds all connection credentials for Extraction and Loading
connections:
marketing_pg:
url: 'postgres://...'
ssh_tunnel: 'ssh://...' # optional
# or dbt profile styled
marketing_pg:
type: postgres
host: [hostname]
user: [username]
password: [password]
port: [port]
dbname: [database name]
schema: [dbt schema]
ssh_tunnel: 'ssh://...'
finance_bq:
type: bigquery
method: service-account
project: [GCP project id]
dataset: [the name of your dbt dataset]
keyfile: [/path/to/bigquery/keyfile.json]
# Global variables for specific settings, available to all connections at runtime (Optional)
variables:
aws_access_key: '...'
aws_secret_key: '...'
sling_send_telemetry: true

Environment Variables

Sling also reads environment variables. Simply export a connection URL (or YAML payload) to the current shell environment to use them.
To see examples of setting environment variables for each type of connector, click below:
  • File/Storage Connections (see here)
  • Database Connections (see here)
Mac / Linux
Windows
$ export MY_PG='postgresql://user:[email protected]:5432/db1'
$ export MY_SNOWFLAKE='snowflake://user:[email protected]/db1'
$ export ORACLE_DB='oracle://user:[email protected]:1521/db1'
$ export BIGQUERY_DB='{type: bigquery, dataset: public, key_file: /path/to/service.json, project: my-google-project}' # yaml or json form is also accepted
$ sling conns list
+---------------+------------------+-----------------+
| CONN NAME | CONN TYPE | SOURCE |
+---------------+------------------+-----------------+
| MY_PG | DB - PostgreSQL | env variable |
| MY_SNOWFLAKE | DB - Snowflake | env variable |
| ORACLE_DB | DB - Oracle | env variable |
| BIGQUERY_DB | DB - Big Query | env variable |
+---------------+------------------+-----------------+
$ $env:MY_PG='postgresql://user:[email protected]:5432/db1'
$ $env:MY_SNOWFLAKE='snowflake://user:[email protected]/db1'
$ $env:ORACLE_DB='oracle://user:[email protected]:1521/db1'
$ $env:BIGQUERY_DB='{type: bigquery, dataset: public, key_file: /path/to/service.json, project: my-google-project}' # yaml or json form is also accepted
$ sling conns list
+---------------+------------------+-----------------+
| CONN NAME | CONN TYPE | SOURCE |
+---------------+------------------+-----------------+
| MY_PG | DB - PostgreSQL | env variable |
| MY_SNOWFLAKE | DB - Snowflake | env variable |
| ORACLE_DB | DB - Oracle | env variable |
+---------------+------------------+-----------------+

DBT Profiles (~/dbt/profiles.yml)

Sling also reads dbt profiles connections! If you're already set up with dbt cli locally, you don't need to create additional duplicate connections.
See here for more details.
$ sling conns list
+------------------+------------------+-------------------+
| CONN NAME | CONN TYPE | SOURCE |
+------------------+------------------+-------------------+
| SNOWCASTLE_DEV | DB - Snowflake | dbt profiles yaml |
| SNOWCASTLE_PROD | DB - Snowflake | dbt profiles yaml |
+------------------+------------------+-------------------+