Hey all! I've just run through the getting started tutorial and got it working. Now I want to share it. But how do I initialize the project folder on a different machine? The folder

.meltano

shouldn't be shared, but then the other machine is not able to do

meltano run [...]

How do you share a Meltano project?

Well, the most basic form would be just your meltano.yml, or whatever you have in the "non-.meltano/" folders additionally. See https://github.com/meltano/squared/tree/main/data for what we have in version control for our (rather big) meltano project. That way, anyone else can run a meltano install and then do a meltano run.

Perfect, thank you Sven! I figured that might be the best way.

If you just have extract, load & possibly mappers, then the meltano.yml is all you need 😄 Once you add dbt or other plugins, you will need to version e.g. the dbt models of course as well (those then go into the transformation folder).

@mogens_nielsen yeah I’d definitely recommend putting your project in version control then once you clone it on another machine you run ‘meltano install’ to get all your packages reinstalled to your .meltano folder on the new machine

@pat_nadolny yeah, but you can't run

meltano install

without the

.meltano

folder. And that folder should not be in version control. And you can't do a

meltano init

inside a folder that isn't empty. It seems to me that I should have only

meltano.yml

in version control and anyone who wants to recreate it would do

meltano init

and then move

meltano.yml

to the newly initialized project. And then, do

meltano install

Does that seem right?

If you put meltano.yml in a directory and run

meltano install

it'll create the .meltano folder and install all the plugins, etc.

@mogens_nielsen yes you can run

meltano install

without the

.meltano

, that command basically takes what youve configured in your meltano.yml and installs it into your

.meltano

folder so its usable.

meltano init

should only be used for the first time you create a project, it scaffolds your directory and gives you your first meltano.yml. Like Sven shared earlier you can check out https://github.com/meltano/squared/tree/main/data as an example of our internal production meltano project, the full scaffold is version controlled

Nice, thank you @thomas_briggs and @pat_nadolny