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Test your changes with Lightdash compile

If you've connected Lightdash to GitHub, you can setup a github action and get Lightdash to compile your project and test your changes whenever you open a pull request.

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.

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.

info

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.

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.

BigQuery
BigQuery OAuth:

Step 1: create a secret called GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS

Add the service account credentials (the JSON file) that you want to use for your GitHub action. It should look something like this:

{
"type": "service_account",
"project_id": "jaffle_shop",
"private_key_id": "12345",
"private_key": "-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY----- ... -----END PRIVATE KEY-----\n",
"client_email": "jaffle_shop@jaffle_shop.iam.gserviceaccount.com",
"client_id": "12345",
"auth_uri": "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth",
"token_uri": "https://oauth2.googleapis.com/token",
"auth_provider_x509_cert_url": "https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v1/certs",
"client_x509_cert_url": "https://www.googleapis.com/robot/v1/metadata/x509/jaffle_shop"
}

Step 2: create another secret called DBT_PROFILES

Copy-paste this template into the secret and fill out the details

[my-bigquery-db]: # this is the name of your project
target: dev
outputs:
dev:
type: bigquery
method: oauth
keyfile: keyfile.json # no need to change this! We'll automatically use the keyfile you created in the last step.
project: [GCP project id]
dataset: [the name of your dbt dataset]

More info in dbt's profiles docs: https://docs.getdbt.com/reference/warehouse-profiles/bigquery-profile#service-account-file

Postgres
Postgres profile configuration:
company-name:
target: dev
outputs:
dev:
type: postgres
host: [hostname]
user: [username]
password: [password]
port: [port]
dbname: [database name]
schema: [dbt schema]
threads: [1 or more]
keepalives_idle: 0
connect_timeout: 10
retries: 1

More info in dbt's profiles docs: https://docs.getdbt.com/reference/warehouse-profiles/postgres-profile#profile-configuration

Redshift
Redshift password-based authentication:
company-name:
target: dev
outputs:
dev:
type: redshift
host: [hostname.region.redshift.amazonaws.com]
user: [username]
password: [password]
port: 5439
dbname: analytics
schema: analytics
threads: 4
keepalives_idle: 240
connect_timeout: 10
ra3_node: true # enables cross-database sources

More info in dbt's profiles docs: https://docs.getdbt.com/reference/warehouse-profiles/redshift-profile#password-based-authentication

Snowflake
User / Password authentication:
my-snowflake-db:
target: dev
outputs:
dev:
type: snowflake
account: [account id]

# User/password auth
user: [username]
password: [password]

role: [user role]
database: [database name]
warehouse: [warehouse name]
schema: [dbt schema]
threads: [1 or more]
client_session_keep_alive: False
query_tag: [anything]

More info in dbt's profiles docs: https://docs.getdbt.com/reference/warehouse-profiles/snowflake-profile#user--password-authentication

DataBricks
Set up a DataBricks target:
your_profile_name:
target: dev
outputs:
dev:
type: databricks
catalog:
[
optional catalog name,
if you are using Unity Catalog,
only available in dbt-databricks>=1.1.1,
]
schema: [schema name]
host: [yourorg.databrickshost.com]
http_path: [/sql/your/http/path]
token: [dapiXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX] # Personal Access Token (PAT)
threads: [1 or more]

More info in dbt's profiles docs: https://docs.getdbt.com/reference/warehouse-profiles/bigquery-profile#service-account-json

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

Github actions page

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.

info

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.

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