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Getting started

This guide takes you from nothing to a Salesforce object synced into Snowflake. It takes about 15 minutes, most of it spent in the Salesforce and Snowflake setup screens.

1. Install

lht needs Python 3.9 or newer.

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate        # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install lht
lht --help

git clone https://github.com/lakehousetools/lht.git
cd lht
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
lht --help

python -m lht --help works too, which is useful when the lht script isn't on your PATH.

2. Set up credentials

You need:

  • Salesforce: an External Client App or Connected App with the OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials flow enabled. Note its consumer key and secret, and your My Domain.
  • Snowflake: a user with an RSA key pair, and a role that can use a warehouse and create tables in the target schema.

Step-by-step instructions are in Authentication.

Use a sandbox first

Syncing only reads from Salesforce, but lht retl and lht merge change records. Try them in a sandbox or Developer Edition org before production.

3. Save connections

lht create-connection --snowflake
lht create-connection --salesforce

Each command prompts for its values and asks whether to make the connection the primary one for its type. Commands use the primary connection unless you pass --snowflake NAME or --salesforce NAME.

lht list-connections
lht connect my_salesforce
lht connect my_snowflake

Connections are saved in ~/.solomo/connections.toml. The directory is 0700 and the file is 0600.

4. Run your first sync

lht sync --sobject Account --table ACCOUNT --schema RAW

On the first run lht:

  1. Describes Account and creates RAW.ACCOUNT with matching Snowflake column types.
  2. Starts a Bulk API 2.0 queryAll job for every field.
  3. Streams the CSV result pages into Snowflake.
  4. Deletes the Bulk job.

Run the same command again and lht loads only records whose LastModifiedDate is newer than the latest one in the table, merging them on ID.

5. Next steps

  • Sync a subset: lht sync --sobject Contact --table CONTACT --where "MailingCountry = 'US'"
  • Rebuild a table from scratch: add --force-full-sync
  • Push scores or enrichment back into Salesforce: see Reverse ETL
  • Schedule syncs: lht is a normal CLI, so cron, Airflow BashOperator, Dagster, GitHub Actions or any other scheduler works. For headless auth, see Python API.