PR review workflows for dbt changes - Mini Project: Build & Apply

PR Review Workflows for dbt Changes

📖 Scenario: You work on a data team that uses dbt to manage data transformations. Your team wants to ensure that every change to the dbt project is reviewed carefully before merging. This helps keep the data models accurate and reliable.

🎯 Goal: You will create a simple PR review workflow for dbt changes. This workflow will run dbt commands to check the changes and show the results in the pull request. This helps your team catch errors early and keep the data pipeline healthy.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a GitHub Actions workflow file named dbt-pr-review.yml

Set the workflow to run on pull requests to the main branch

Add a job that sets up Python and installs dbt

Run dbt compile to check for syntax errors

Run dbt test to run tests on the changed models

Output the results so reviewers can see if the changes pass

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Teams use PR review workflows to catch errors in dbt projects before merging changes. This keeps data models accurate and prevents broken pipelines.

💼 Career

Data engineers and analytics engineers often create and maintain CI/CD workflows for dbt to ensure data quality and reliability.

1

Create the workflow file and trigger

Create a file named .github/workflows/dbt-pr-review.yml. Inside it, start a workflow with the name dbt PR Review that triggers on pull requests to the main branch. Write the YAML lines to set this up.

dbt

# Create the workflow file and set it to run on pull requests to main
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use name: to name the workflow. Use on: pull_request: branches: - main to trigger on PRs to main.

2

Add a job to set up Python and install dbt

Add a job named dbt-check that runs on ubuntu-latest. Inside the job, add steps to check out the code, set up Python 3.12, and install dbt using pip install dbt-core.

dbt

name: dbt PR Review

on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  dbt-check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use actions/checkout@v3 to get the code. Use actions/setup-python@v4 with python-version: '3.12'. Then run pip install dbt-core.

3

Add steps to run dbt compile and dbt test

Inside the dbt-check job's steps, add two run commands: one to run dbt compile and one to run dbt test. These commands check the syntax and run tests on the dbt models.

dbt

name: dbt PR Review

on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  dbt-check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Set up Python 3.12
        uses: actions/setup-python@v4
        with:
          python-version: '3.12'
      - name: Install dbt
        run: pip install dbt-core
      # Add dbt compile and dbt test steps below
      # Your code here

Need a hint?

Add two steps with run: dbt compile and run: dbt test to check your dbt models.

4

Print the workflow summary output

Add a final step in the dbt-check job to print a message dbt PR review completed. Use a run command with echo to display this message in the workflow logs.

dbt

name: dbt PR Review

on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  dbt-check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Set up Python 3.12
        uses: actions/setup-python@v4
        with:
          python-version: '3.12'
      - name: Install dbt
        run: pip install dbt-core
      - name: Run dbt compile
        run: dbt compile
      - name: Run dbt test
        run: dbt test
      # Add a final echo step below
      # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo "dbt PR review completed" in a run step to print the message.