Skip to content

Configuration#

Checkers provides two types of configuration.

The first type is check parameters. These are variables that control the behaviour of individual checks. For example, you might want to run a specific check only on certain directories in your dbt project.

The second type is runner parameters. These variables control the behaviour of the runner, and generally apply to every check that gets run. For example, you might want to have all checks only ever raise a warning, rather than fail.

Both check parameters and runner parameters can be set via a linter.toml configuration file. We recommend generating the linter.toml using the init command, as it will include all default configuration values for all checks.

checkers init

Check Parameters#

The parameters of an individual check are located in a specific section of the configuration file. Here's what that looks like for two checks check_model_has_description and check_model_has_primary_key_test.

[checks.check_model_has_description]
enabled = true
exclude_paths = []
include_paths = []
minimum_description_length = 10
minimum_description_words = 4

[checks.check_model_has_primary_key_test]
enabled = true
exclude_paths = []
include_paths = []

Notice that some configuration options appear for both checks, such as the exclude_paths field. Other options are unique to a specific check, such as minimum_description_word_length, which is only relevant for the model description checks.

In the rest of this section we'll describe the check parameters that are common to all checks. For more information about the parameters available for individual checks, you can consult the documentation for that specific check. For example, here's the documentation for the check_model_has_description.

enabled: bool = True #

This flag can be used to completely disable the check. Disabled checks are never ran.

exclude_paths: Optional[List[Path]] = list() #

A set of paths that the check should skip. The paths must be relative to the dbt project directory.

include_paths: Optional[List[Path]] = list() #

A set of paths that the check should target, so that any node which lives outside of these paths will be skipped. The paths must be relative to the dbt project directory.

Info

Currently Checkers does not support regexes here.

Info

If a path is defined in both include and exclude paths, then the model will be skipped. Ie, exclude_paths takes priority over include_paths.

Runner parameters#

The runner can be configured in three ways:

  • The linter.toml file
  • Command line options specified when using the checkers cli.
  • Environment variables

Command line options take precedence over environment variables, and environment variables take precedence over values in the linter.toml file.

The runner current supports the following parameters.

dbt_project_dir#

  • checkers --dbt-project-dir ./path/to/project [COMMAND]
  • Environment variable: DBT_PROJECT_DIR.

The path to a dbt project containing the models to lint.