Hi folks, really big fan of the project and looking to make a POC to replace a set of hand-written connectors with Meltano over the coming weeks. The biggest question I have is around the programmatic creation of connector configurations in Python. Right now to best integrate with our existing platform, we'd really like to be able to create a Meltano connector from Python code, or potentially the experimental REST API. There is always the possibility of running the CLI commands in a Bash subprocess from our Python project, but this is a little bit hacky. Is this possible right now with Meltano, planned for the future, or is there a reason why invoking Meltano from Python could be considered an anti-pattern?

https://meltano.slack.com/archives/CMN8HELB0/p1667257485038679?thread_ts=1667255568.607199&cid=CMN8HELB0 AFAIK, there haven't been any announcements around a Python library or REST API for Meltano since this thread. For what it's worth, we run Meltano from a Bash subprocess in production with no issues (although we would obviously prefer a library if there was one available).

Awesome, thanks for the vote of confidence for a production usecase. I think a small Python wrapper around the Bash Subprocess should work for us, but will happily vote for a Python library for future Meltano feature planning

I agree. 😄 If you haven't already got a starting point for a wrapper implementation, a couple of months ago I made a simple example of how it can work: https://meltano.slack.com/archives/CMN8HELB0/p1663767988942499?thread_ts=1663765675.416489&cid=CMN8HELB0

It does feel odd to use subprocess to call a Python CLI from Python, but it’s important to remember that the taps and targets are kept in isolated virtual environments to avoid dependency conflicts.