🕵️ dbtective

dbtective is a Rust-powered 'detective' for dbt metadata best practices. As your dbt project grows, keeping metadata consistent and high-quality can become a real challenge.

Explore the full documentation or the possible rules.

Warning

dbtective is currently in very early stages. Issues and commits are more than welcome!

dbtective makes it easy to spot and fix common issues, examples:

• Missing descriptions: Does every model and seed have a description?
• Column types: Are all columns explicitly typed?
• Ownership: Do all sources have an owner?
• Naming conventions: Are all marts following your team's naming standards?

We detect and enforce these rules in your cli, prek/pre-commit and CI/CD pipeline, so fast you will barely notice🕵️.

Installation

Pip (pypi)

pip install dbtective

uv

Install as a dev dependency:

uv add dbtective --dev

Homebrew

brew install feliblo/tap/dbtective

GitHub Actions

Run dbtective as part of your CI/CD pipeline. See the GitHub Actions documentation for more details.

- uses: feliblo/[email protected]
  with:
    config-file: "dbtective.yml"
    entry-point: "."
    only-manifest: "true"
    verbose: "false"

prek/pre-commit

Prerequisite: dbtective is installed via one of the methods above.

We (currently) recommend using the --only-manifest flag with prek/pre-commit to avoid issues caused by catalog.json mismatches. For more details, see the explanation in the rules documentation.

Add the following to your .pre-commit-config.yaml.

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/feliblo/dbtective
    rev: v0.1.29
    hooks:
      - id: dbtective-run
        args: [--only-manifest]

And run

prek install
prek run --all-files
# or with pre-commit
pre-commit install
pre-commit run --all-files

Shell installer (macOS/Linux)

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/feliblo/dbtective/releases/latest/download/dbtective-installer.sh | sh

PowerShell installer (Windows)

irm https://github.com/feliblo/dbtective/releases/latest/download/dbtective-installer.ps1 | iex

Binary download

Pre-built binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows are available on the releases page.

Quickstart

All possible rules can be found in the rules documentation. Information about customizing dbtective is shown at the config documentation

1. Create a dbtective.yml config file in the root of your dbt project by running:

More about the init (it also supports pyproject.toml or dbtective.toml) command is available in the init documentation.

dbtective init

Inspect the contents of the generated dbtective.yml file and modify it to fit your project's needs.

1. (Optional) Generate the dbt manifest and catalog files if you haven't done so already. Most dbt commands automatically generate the manifest.json, but if you want to ensure both files are up to date, run:

dbt compile
dbt docs generate

1. Run dbtective in the root of your current directory or specify an entry point if your dbt_project is not located in the root/current drectory.

dbtective run
dbtective run --entry-point "my_dbt_project"

1. Review the output and fix any issues found.

2. (Optional) Integrate dbtective into your CI/CD pipeline or pre-commit hooks to automate rules on every commit and/or pull request.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Whether you're fixing bugs, adding features, or improving documentation, your help makes dbtective better for everyone.

For detailed contributing guidelines, development setup, and coding standards, please see the contributing documentation.

Acknowledgements

This project is heavily inspired dbt dbt-bouncer. It tries to improve certain aspects of the amazing work by pgoslatara, while giving me an opportunity to improve my Rust. More about the aspects we try to improve is available in our FAQ.