dbt-superset-lineage

Make dbt docs and Apache Superset talk to one another

Why do I need something like this?

Odds are rather high that you use dbt together with a visualisation tool. If so, these questions might have popped
into your head time to time:

“Could I get rid of this model? Does it get used for some dashboards? And in which ones, if yes?”
“It would be so handy to see all these well-maintained column descriptions when exploring and creating charts.”

In case your visualisation tool of choice is Supserset, you are in luck!

Using dbt-superset-lineage, you can:

Add dependencies of Superset dashboards to your dbt sources and models
Sync column descriptions from dbt docs to Superset

This will help you:

Avoid broken dashboards because of deprecated or changed models
Choosing the right attributes without navigating back and forth between chart and documentation

Installation

pip install dbt-superset-lineage

Usage

dbt-superset-lineage comes with two basic commands: pull-dashboards and push-descriptions.
The documentation for the individual commands can be shown by using the --help option.

It includes a wrapper for Superset API, one only needs to provide
SUPERSET_ACCESS_TOKEN/SUPERSET_REFRESH_TOKEN (obtained via /security/login)
as environment variable or through --superset-access-token/superset-refresh-token option.

N.B.

Make sure to run dbt compile (or dbt run) against the production profile, not your development profile
In case more databases are used within dbt and/or Superset and there are duplicate names (schema + table) across
them, specify the database through --dbt-db-name and/or --superset-db-id options
Currently, PUT requests are only supported if CSRF tokens are disabled in Superset (WTF_CSRF_ENABLED=False).
Tested on dbt v0.20.0 and Apache Superset v1.3.0. Other versions, esp. those newer of Superset, might face errors due
to different underlying code and API.

Pull dashboards

Pull dashboards from Superset and add them as
exposures to dbt docs with
references to dbt sources and models, making them visible both separately and as dependencies.

N.B.

Only published dashboards are extracted.

$ cd jaffle_shop
$ dbt compile  # Compile project to create manifest.json
$ export SUPERSET_ACCESS_TOKEN=<TOKEN>
$ dbt-superset-lineage pull-dashboards https://mysuperset.mycompany.com  # Pull dashboards from Superset to /models/exposures/superset_dashboards.yml
$ dbt docs generate # Generate dbt docs
$ dbt docs serve # Serve dbt docs

Push descriptions

Push column descriptions from your dbt docs to Superset as plain text so that they could be viewed
in Superset when creating charts.

N.B.:

Run carefully as this rewrites your datasets using merged column metadata from Superset and dbt docs.
Descriptions are rendered as plain text, hence no markdown syntax, incl. links, will be displayed.
Avoid special characters and strings in your dbt docs, e.g. → or <null>.

$ cd jaffle_shop
$ dbt compile  # Compile project to create manifest.json
$ export SUPERSET_ACCESS_TOKEN=<TOKEN>
$ dbt-superset-lineage push-descriptions https://mysuperset.mycompany.com  # Push descrptions from dbt docs to Superset