How to Install Connector SDK

Follow the steps below to install and configure the Connector SDK locally.

See Upgrade your Connector SDK package if you need to update an installed package.

Prerequisites

Python version support

Connector SDK supports the following Python versions:

3.14
3.13
3.12
3.11
3.10

Python may be global or managed in a virtual environment.

When specifying a Python runtime version for deployment, use one of the supported versions listed above. For more information, see fivetran deploy.

Operating system support

Connector SDK supports the following operating systems for the testing environment:

Windows: 10 or later, 64-bit only
macOS: 13 Ventura or later, Apple Silicon arm64 or Intel x86_64
Linux: Ubuntu 20.04 or later, Debian 10 or later, or Amazon Linux 2 or later, arm64 or x86_64

Create a Python virtual environment

We recommend you create a separate Python virtual environment on your local machine for each custom connector you write using Connector SDK. A Python virtual environment isolates one project's dependencies from another's. This prevents version conflicts, so if you write multiple connectors that require different library versions, they don't interfere with each other.

Use uv to create and activate a virtual environment before installing the Connector SDK or running any connector commands.

Install uv by following the official installation instructions.
Install the required Python version. For example:
```
uv python install 3.13.7
```
Create a virtual environment using that Python version:
```
uv venv --python 3.13.7 venv
```
Activate the virtual environment by following the instructions in the uv virtual environments documentation.

See our Using Environment Variables With the Connector SDK guide for details on how to use environment variables.

Install Connector SDK

In the same directory where you created your virtual environment, run the following command after activating it:

pip install fivetran-connector-sdk

To learn how to work with the SDK's CLI, see our Connector SDK CLI Commands documentation.

We pre-install the msodbcsql17 and msodbcsql18 drivers for connecting to Microsoft SQL Server. We also pre-install libpq5 and libpq-dev, which are required to support psycopg and psycopg2 respectively.

For Connector SDK connections that use Hybrid Deployment, we install Ubuntu packages in the SDK runtime image from the September 17, 2026 snapshot (20260917T000000Z). Third-party repositories, such as the Microsoft package repository, are not pinned to this snapshot.

The Connector SDK CLI collects anonymous usage telemetry by default. For more details and instructions on how to disable it, see Data Use and Telemetry.

Upgrade your Connector SDK package

We recommend always using the latest version of the Connector SDK, as it contains all the latest definitions and updates. You can upgrade it using the following pip command:

pip install --upgrade fivetran-connector-sdk

Troubleshooting

If you are experiencing issues with installing or upgrading your Connector SDK package, see our troubleshooting articles: