Adding this Lightdash compile action will compile your dbt project’s .yml files and check to see if there are any errors that will break your Lightdash project. For example, a metric that references a dimension that doesn’t exist.

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Step 1: add the credentials to Github secrets

We are going to add some secrets and config to GitHub actions, but you don’t want those to be public, so the best way to do this is to add them as secrets on Github.

If you already have a GitHub action for Lightdash, then you can use the same Lightdash secrets you created for your other action.

Go to your repo, click on Settings , on the left sidebar, click on Secrets under Security. Now click on the New repository secret

We need to add the following secrets:

LIGHTDASH_API_KEY

Create a new personal access token, by going to Settings > Personal Access Tokens. This is the token you’ll put in for LIGHTDASH_API_KEY.

LIGHTDASH_PROJECT

The UUID for your project. For example, if your URL looks like https://eu1.lightdash.cloud/projects/3538ab33-dc90-aabb-bc00-e50bba3a5f69/tables, then 3538ab33-dc90-45f0-aabb-e50bba3a5f69 is your LIGHTDASH_PROJECT

LIGHTDASH_URL

This is either https://eu1.lightdash.cloud or https://app.lightdash.cloud for Lightdash Cloud users (check the URL to your Lightdash project). If you self-host, this should be your own custom domain.

DBT_PROFILES

Some tips for this bit:

  • You might be able to copy a bunch of the information from your local profiles.yml file. You can see what’s in there by typing cat ~/.dbt/profiles.yml in your terminal.
  • If you have a separate prod and dev profile, you probably want to use the information from your prod profile for your GitHub action.
  • If you want to have different connection settings depending on the user that opened the pull request (dev profiles), then check out this guide.

Find your data warehouse from the list below to get a profiles.yml file template. Fill out this template, and this is your DBT_PROFILES secret.

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Step 2: Create deploy.yml workflow in Github

Go to your repo, click on Actions menu.

If you don’t have any GitHub actions, you’ll just need to click on Configure

If you have some GitHub actions in your repo already, click on New workflow, then select setup a workflow yourself.

Now copy this file from our cli-actions repo.

If you only use a subset of your dbt models in Lightdash, then you’ll want to specify that subset in your file here.

For example, to only compile models with the tag lightdash, you would change this line to: run: lightdash compile --select tag:lightdash --project-dir "$PROJECT_DIR" --profiles-dir . --profile prod || lightdash compile --select tag:lightdash --project-dir "$PROJECT_DIR" --profiles-dir .

Give it a nice name like compile-lightdash.yml

And commit this to your repo by clicking on Start commit.

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You’re done!

Everytime you open a new pull request on the repository that contains your Lightdash project, lightdash compile will run and check to see if any of the changes you made will break your Lightdash instance.

You can see the log on the Github actions page

Raise issue