Getting Started

Prerequisites

Recce requires that your dbt project has two separate environments that refers to different schemas. For example, one for production with prod schema and another for development with dev schema.

Recce can get your schema from all data warehouses, so you don't need to update the profiles.yml. However, if you use duckdb, you need to add a separate schemas in your dbt profile so you can run locally.Your profiles.yml might look something like this:

jaffle_shop:
  target: dev
  outputs:
    dev:
      type: duckdb
      path: jaffle_shop.duckdb
      schema: dev
    prod:
      type: duckdb
      path: jaffle_shop.duckdb
      schema: main

Install Recce

Install Recce using pip:

pip install -U recce

Use Recce in your dbt project

The following instructions give an overview of the process of using Recce in your dbt project. For a hands-on tutorial, please check the Jaffle Shop Tutorial.

Navigate to your dbt project.

cd your-dbt-project/

Prepare dbt artifacts

Recce expects two sets of dbt artifacts to be present:

• target-base/ - dbt artifacts for to be used as the base for the comparison e.g. production
• target/ - dbt artifacts for your development branch

Prepare artifacts for the base environment

For most data warehouses, you can download the artifacts generated from the codebase of your main branch. You don't need to re-run the whole production in your local.

However, if you use duckdb, you need to generate the artifacts for the base environment. Checkout the main branch of your project and generate the required artifacts into target-base. You can skip dbt build if this environment already exists.

git checkout main

dbt run --target prod
dbt docs generate --target prod --target-path target-base/

Generate artifacts for the target environment

git checkout feature/my-awesome-feature

dbt run
dbt docs generate

Start the Recce server

Start the Recce server with the follow command:

recce server

Recce use dbt artifacts, which is generated when every invocation. You can find these files in the target/ folder.

artifacts	dbt command
manifest.json	dbt docs generate, dbt run, ..
catalog.json	dbt docs generate

Tip

The regeneration of the catalog.json file is not required after every dbt run. it is only required to regenerate this file when models or columns are added or updated.

First Time Guide for Recce instance

After you start the Recce server, you can see the Recce instance, the Web UI of the active Recce server.

Here are the 3 steps to use Recce: (see the image below)

1. Click the model you want to check
2. Click “Explore Change”
3. Click “Add to Checklist”