README.md

July 24, 2026 · View on GitHub

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dbt-bouncer

Configure and enforce conventions for your dbt project.

coverage security: bandit
dbt-core dbt Cloud Supported Docker Supported GitHub Actions Supported

Documentation

All documentation can be found on dbt-bouncer documentation website.

Aims

dbt-bouncer aims to:

  • Provide a 100% configurable way to enforce conventions in a dbt project.
  • Be as fast as possible, running checks against dbt artifacts.
  • Be as easy as possible to use, with a simple config file written in YAML or TOML.
  • Be as flexible as possible, allowing checks to be written in Python.
  • Provide immediate feedback when run as a pre-commit hook or as part of a CI pipeline.

TLDR

  1. Install dbt-bouncer:

    pip install dbt-bouncer
    
  2. dbt-bouncer requires a manifest.json file. If not already present, run:

    dbt parse
    
  3. Create a dbt-bouncer.yml config file:

    dbt-bouncer init
    
  4. Run dbt-bouncer:

    $ dbt-bouncer run
    Running dbt-bouncer (X.X.X)...
    Loaded config from dbt-bouncer-example.yml...
    Validating conf...
    
                Parsed artifacts for
              'dbt_bouncer_test_project'
    ╭──────────────────┬─────────────────┬───────╮
    │ Artifact         │ Category        │ Count │
    ├──────────────────┼─────────────────┼───────┤
    │ manifest.json    │ Exposures       │     2 │
    │                  │ Macros          │     3 │
    │                  │ Nodes           │    12 │
    │                  │ Seeds           │     3 │
    │                  │ Semantic Models │     1 │
    │                  │ Snapshots       │     2 │
    │                  │ Sources         │     4 │
    │                  │ Tests           │    36 │
    │                  │ Unit Tests      │     3 │
    │ catalog.json     │ Nodes           │    13 │
    │                  │ Sources         │     0 │
    │ run_results.json │ Results         │    51 │
    ╰──────────────────┴─────────────────┴───────╯
    Assembled 463 checks, running...
    Running checks... ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100%
    `dbt-bouncer` failed. Please see below for more details or run `dbt-bouncer` with the `-v` flag.
    Failed checks
    ╭────────────────────────────────────┬────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
    │ Check name                         │  Severity  │ Failure message                                                                                                          │
    ├────────────────────────────────────┼────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
    │ check_model_names:48:orders        │   ERROR    │ Models in the staging layer should always start with "stg_". - `orders` does not match the supplied regex `^stg_`.       │
    ╰────────────────────────────────────┴────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
    Done. SUCCESS=462 WARN=0 ERROR=1
    

Reporting bugs and contributing code

  • Want to report a bug or request a feature? Let us know and open an issue.
  • Want to help us build dbt-bouncer? Check out the Contributing Guide.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in dbt-bouncer's codebase, issue trackers, chat rooms, and mailing lists is expected to follow the Code of Conduct.