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Looker & LookML Ingestion Guide: Setup

Looker Prerequisites​

To configure ingestion from Looker, you'll first have to ensure you have an API key to access the Looker resources.

Login To Looker Instance​

Login to your Looker instance(e.g. https://<your-looker-instance-name>.cloud.looker.com).

Navigate to Admin Panel & click Roles to open Roles Panel.

Looker home page

Looker roles search

Create A New Permission Set​

On Roles Panel, click New Permission Set.

Looker new permission set

Set a name for the new permission set (e.g., DataHub Connector Permission Set) and select the following permissions.

Permission List
  • access_data
  • see_lookml_dashboards
  • see_looks
  • see_user_dashboards
  • explore
  • see_sql
  • see_lookml
  • clear_cache_refresh
  • manage_models
  • see_datagroups
  • see_pdts
  • see_queries
  • see_schedules
  • see_system_activity
  • see_users

After selecting all permissions mentioned above, click New Permission Set at the bottom of the page.

Looker permission set window

Create A Role​

On the Roles Panel, click New Role.

Looker new role button

Set the name for the new role (e.g., DataHub Extractor) and set the following fields on this window.

  • Set Permission Set to permission set created in previous step (i.e DataHub Connector Permission Set)
  • Set Model Set to All

Finally, click New Role at the bottom of the page.

Looker new role window

Create A New User​

On the Admin Panel, click Users to open the users panel.

Looker user search

Click Add Users.

Looker add user

On Adding a new user, set details in the following fields.

  • Add user's Email Addresses.
  • Set Roles to the role created in previous step (e.g. DataHub Extractor)

Finally, click Save.

Looker new user window

Create An API Key​

On the User Panel, click on the newly created user.

Looker user panel

Click Edit Keys to open the API Key Panel.

Looker user view

On the API Key Panel, click New API Key to generate a new Client ID and Client Secret.

Looker new api key

LookML Prerequisites​

Follow the below steps to create the GitHub Deploy Key.

Generate a private-public SSH key pair​

ssh-keygen -t rsa -f looker_datahub_deploy_key
# If prompted, don't add a passphrase to the key

This will typically generate two files like the one below.

  • looker_datahub_deploy_key (private key)
  • looker_datahub_deploy_key.pub (public key)

Add Deploy Key to GitHub Repository​

First, log in to GitHub.

Navigate to GitHub Repository -> Settings -> Deploy Keys and add a public key (e.g. looker_datahub_deploy_key.pub) as deploy key with read access.

Looker home page

Make a note of the private key file. You must paste the file's contents into the GitHub Deploy Key field later while configuring ingestion on the DataHub Portal.

Next Steps​

Once you've done all the above steps, it's time to move on to configuring the actual ingestion source within DataHub.

Need more help? Join the conversation in Slack!