Setup Airbyte on your machine in 5 minutes or less!

Airbyte is a data extraction tool that enables you to quickly extract data from multiple sources. The open-source version of Airbyte is absolutely free, can be self hosted either on your own laptop or your cloud environment. The one thing I really like about Airbyte is that it comes shipped with a very usable and functional User Interface. Let's dive in and setup Airbyte on your laptop in 5 minutes or less. This tutorial assumes you have a Macbook laptop.

Pre-requisites

Before you get started, make sure you have docker installed on your machine. If you don’t have it yet, go to Docker: Accelerated, Containerized Application Development and download the desktop version.

Step #1: Install Airbyte

Open terminal on your machine and Create a folder on your machine for Airbyte and navigate to it

mkdir airbyte

Now, run these 3 commands to install and start Airbyte

# clone Airbyte from GitHub
 git clone https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte.git
 
# switch into Airbyte directory
 cd airbyte
 
# start Airbyte
 docker compose up

Step #2: Airbyte is now installed! Let's give it a run

Once Airbyte is up and running on docker, you can access it from your browser on http://localhost:8000

You will be asked for a username and password. By default, that's username airbyte and password password. Once you deploy airbyte to your servers, be sure to change these

Step #3 - Let's get started with your first connection

Let's now start extracting some data by setting up a connection. Click on the New connection button on the top right of your screen and get started.

Now you can follow the steps on the UI and select a new source - to begin with, you can connect your Google Analytics account.

When you're setting up the source, you will be required to provide some details, including setting up of a service account in your Google cloud console - follow this guide for more.

Now, let's go ahead and set up a destination - to begin with, we can just have the data extracted to CSV format for us to test it out. Define your destination path. If you've not made any changes to your docker installation, these files will show up in your 'tmp' directory in the root folder of your Mac machine. This is a hidden folder location, use the Command + Shift + "." keys to expose it.

Step #4 - That's it! Let's run your Airbyte extract and get a hold of your data

Once your setup is completed, you will be presented with various connector specific options such as replication frequency, and the different kinds of reports / extracts that are available by default. When it comes to Google Analytics, you can also setup your own custom report formats by making use of the GA Query Explorer to understand what combinations of dimensions and metrics work.

Just click on "Sync Now" and watch the magic unfold!

Within a few minutes, I can see my data extract in the correct folder

You're already up and running with Airbyte. Here's what you can do next

Airbyte is a really great tool for setting up data extractions from different sources. It's easy to deploy on your own cloud or sign up for the fully managed Airbyte cloud as well. Were you able to setup Airbyte on your laptop? Drop in your comments below and let us know!