Anyone know how to generate dbt docs via meltano?

meltano invoke dbt docs generate

? (seems to be missing some env vars that way or somethign)

This isn’t an area I have a lot of experience in yet, but @taylor might have tips. I do think you may need to explicitly add

--project-dir $DBT_PROJECT_DIR --profile $DBT_PROFILE

into that invocation statement. It’s fortuitous that you ask this question today because I was just reviewing @julian_knight’s pending MR that could be leveraged to create a shortcut like

meltano invoke dbt:docs-generate

as described here with some dbt example commands: Add support for shortcut commands for plugins (#2560) · Issues · meltano / Meltano · GitLab I believe in the meanwhile, you may still need to explicitly reference

--project-dir

and

--profile

, but perhaps @taylor or @julian_knight can confirm.

Nice. Yeah I figured I might need to set something like that but wasn’t entirely sure what context/environment looks like with

invoke

.

I haven’t tried to spin up the docs through invoke, but since

invoke

is just running the specified executable, I suspect you’d have to pass in any of the required args

I haven't gotten to play with the docs feature of dbt yet. I know Meltano does specify a number of arguments through DBT_* env vars but I don't know which args vs which you need for the docs subcommand. But as others suggested you can always specify the args explicitly and it should work just fine

Sounds good!

I’m not 100 percent sure on that, but I believe the

elt

version gets additional context that is perhaps not automatically sent in the invoke statement.

That's actually not true, in fact I noted this opportunity for confusion in the MR https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/-/merge_requests/2028#note_541483601

Got it! Thanks for clarifying! 👍