🕵️ 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.

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/dbtective@v0.2.2
  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 recommend using --only-manifest and --hide-warnings with prek/pre-commit to avoid issues caused by catalog.json mismatches. Eligible catalog rules automatically fall back to manifest data. See the pre-commit documentation and Only Manifest Mode for details.

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

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/feliblo/dbtective
    rev: v0.2.2
    hooks:
      - id: dbtective-run
        entry: dbtective run
        args: [--only-manifest, --hide-warnings]

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. Generate your config file by answering a few simple questions:

   dbtective init

   This walks you through picking a config format, and which rules to enable. It then generates a config you can start with. See the CLI reference for details.

2. (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

   Tip: For local development and pre-commit, use --only-manifest to skip catalog.json. Eligible catalog rules will fall back to manifest data automatically.

3. 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"

4. Review the output and fix any issues found.

5. (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 by 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.