Self-host Lightdash using docker compose

This guide will give you a minimal Lightdash instance running on your local machine. It will not be accessible from the internet, but it will be accessible from your local machine. This is a great way to get started with Lightdash for a proof-of-concept without needing access to kubernetes.

Prerequisites

1. Clone the Lightdash repository

Clone the Lightdash code to your local machine. This will create a new directory called ./lightdash (the Lightdash directory).

# Clone the Lightdash repo
git clone https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash
cd lightdash

2. Update your ENV config

Edit all the ENV variables in .env to match your setup, eg:

PGHOST=db
PGPORT=5432
PGUSER=pg_user *OR* machine username if no prior postgres set up
PGPASSWORD=pg_password *OR* blank if no prior postgres set up
PGDATABASE=postgres
DBT_DEMO_DIR=/*path*/*to*/lightdash/project/examples/full-jaffle-shop-demo

3. Create containers

You must set the following two environment variables:

PGPASSWORD is the password used for the internal postgres database
LIGHTDASH_SECRET is the secret used to encrypt data at rest in the database. If you lose this secret, you will not be able to access your data in Lightdash.

export LIGHTDASH_SECRET="not very secret"
export PGPASSWORD="password"

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml --env-file .env up --detach --remove-orphans

To connect a local dbt project, do two things before you run the command above: uncomment the volumes lines under the lightdash service in docker-compose.yml (they are commented out by default), and export DBT_PROJECT_DIR with the absolute path to your dbt project on your machine. Lightdash mounts it at /usr/app/dbt inside the container and reads the project from there. The error dbt project directory not found: /dbt names only the last folder of that path: it means /usr/app/dbt doesn’t exist in the container, because the volumes lines are still commented out or DBT_PROJECT_DIR was empty when you started the containers. If you have a Windows machine and get the error Error response from daemon: i/o timeout. Go to Docker > Settings > General and enable the option Expose daemon on tcp://localhost:2375 without TLS

​Prerequisites

​1. Clone the Lightdash repository

​2. Update your ENV config

​3. Create containers

Prerequisites

1. Clone the Lightdash repository

2. Update your ENV config

3. Create containers