Skip to main content
Lightdash builds your BI layer straight from your dbt project. This is the shortest path from zero to exploring your first Tables — three steps, each linking to the detail you need along the way.
  1. Prepare your dbt project. Install the Lightdash CLI, point it at your dbt project, and generate your first Tables so there’s something to explore.
  2. Connect your warehouse and dbt project. Swap your local setup for a service account and link your version-controlled dbt project so Lightdash stays in sync. Warehouse-specific connection details — BigQuery, Snowflake, Postgres, and more — live in this step. If your warehouse sits in a private VPC, you’ll also need to connect through an SSH tunnel.
  3. Invite your team. Bring in teammates with the right roles, or let people with your work email domain join automatically.
Work through the three steps in order. When your project is live, pick the track that matches what you’re doing next: explore your data to query, visualize, and share, or build your semantic layer to define metrics and dimensions as code.

Prepare your dbt project

Install the Lightdash CLI, generate your first Tables from your dbt models, and create your project

Connect your warehouse and dbt project

Connection settings for every supported warehouse, from BigQuery to DuckDB, plus every way to import a dbt project

Connect through an SSH tunnel

Reach a Postgres or Redshift database in a private VPC by tunnelling through a bastion host

Invite your team

Invite people to your Lightdash project so you can share content with them