> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://ciusji.gitbook.io/luden/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://ciusji.gitbook.io/luden/configuration/sources-conf.md).

# Sources Conf

Sources (or connectors) are used to import data from external API (Google Analytics, Facebook, etc) or databases (redis, firebase, etc) into [destinations](/luden/configuration/destinations-conf.md). Each source represents a connection to a particular API.

The synchronization scheduling engine is called sync tasks.

Luden supports 3 types of sources:

* Native source (Example: Google Ads, Facebook) 🚀
* [Singer](https://singer.io/) based source. Singer as a collection of ETL-connectors written in Python. Singer-based source are not part of Luden codebase. Luden just run the python package, processes output and saves data to a destination. (NOT RECOMMEND!)
* [Airbyte](https://airbyte.io/) based sources. Airbyte as an ETL-framewark similar to Singer. Airbyte sources are distributed as docker images. Luden pull those images, run theme and puts output to a database. 🚀

## Collection Configuration

Sources should define a list of collections (or streams) explicitly. Each collection defines a synchronization schedule, destination table name (table name will be prefixed with `source_id` to avoid collisions). Here's an example configuration snippet:

```yaml
sources:
  firebase_example_id:
  collections:
    - name: "some_name"
      type: "collection_type_id"
      table_name: "table_name_for_data"
      start_date: "2020-06-01"
      schedule: '@daily' #cron expression. see below
      parameters:
        field1: "value"
        field2: ["values"]
        field3:
          some_object:
      ...
```