Save In-Progress Sources and Destinations With Draft Mode

Save sources and destinations as drafts in Airbyte, then return to finish setup when you’re ready.

DATA

September 29, 2026

Richelle Herrli

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Save In-Progress Sources and Destinations With Draft Mode

Setting up a source or destination in Airbyte Cloud sometimes takes more than one sitting. Especially when you're working with destinations, you may need to confer with multiple teams for setup and troubleshooting. You might not have the right credentials handy, you're waiting on a database admin for a hostname, or you need to confirm the correct streams your team needs. And if you closed the setup page, you had to start over from scratch.

While we still haven't solved the problem of asking multiple teams for the disparate pieces of information, at least Airbyte Cloud now supports draft mode for source and destination configuration. A new Save draft button lets you preserve an incomplete setup, hunt down the IT Admin for the correct password, and pick up where you left off.

What draft mode does

When you're configuring a new source or destination, you'll see a Save draft button alongside the existing Test and save option. Save draft allows you to save your current configuration without requiring a successful connection test. Draft connectors appear in your source and destination tables with a Draft tag so you can tell at a glance which ones are still incomplete.

Drafts are intentionally blocked from connections and syncs. You cannot attach a draft source or destination to a connection, and no data will move through one. A draft is promoted to a live connector only after it passes a successful connection test, which keeps your pipelines clean, ensuring only fully configured sources and destinations can move data.

When this helps

The setup form for some connectors is long. Database sources alone ask for a host, port, schema, SSH tunnel configuration, SSL certificates, and replication method before you even get to stream selection. Warehouse destinations need project IDs, dataset names, loading methods, and transformation settings.

In practice, most of the information you need for a connector lives in different places. The hostname is in your infrastructure dashboard. The credentials are in your secrets manager. The stream names are in a Slack thread from last Tuesday. Gathering everything into a single uninterrupted session isn't always realistic.

Draft mode removes the pressure to enter everything in one pass. Save what you have, close the tab, and finish the rest when you can finally access the correct secret.

How to use it

You can save a draft with the following steps.

Navigate to Sources or Destinations in Airbyte Cloud and click + New source or + New destination.
Choose your connector and start filling in the configuration fields.
When you need to stop, select Save draft instead of Test and save. Your connector will then appear in the table with a Draft tag.
When you're ready to finish, open the draft, complete the remaining fields, and select Test and save. A successful test promotes the draft to a live connector. Otherwise, it stays a draft.

Availability

Draft mode is available to all Airbyte Cloud users now. The next time you set up a source or destination, the Save draft button will be there.

For more details on configuring sources and destinations, see the Airbyte docs for adding a source and adding a destination.

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About the Author

Richelle Herrli

Richelle Herrli is a Senior Developer Advocate at Airbyte

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Save In-Progress Sources and Destinations With Draft Mode

Integrate with 700+ apps using Airbyte

Integrate with 700+ apps using Airbyte

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