dbdocs 1.6.3

Alternative dbt docs site: Catalog + ERD + column-level lineage

An alternative dbt docs site — catalog + ERD + column-level lineage + versioned deploys, all in one CLI.

Turn your dbt artifacts into a self-contained docs site: a browsable catalog, an entity-relationship diagram, an interactive lineage DAG, and column-level lineage traced from your compiled SQL — all in one dbdocs generate. Serve it with dbdocs serve, or deploy versioned builds anywhere a static host will take them.

Catalog	Model page	Lineage DAG	Health Check

Why dbdocs?

dbt's built-in docs stop short of telling you which upstream column fed this downstream column, which tables relate to each other, or what changed between builds. dbdocs fills those gaps — no documentation framework or separate ERD tool to install.

• ERD + column-level lineage — table relationships (dbterd) and column lineage from compiled SQL (sqlglot).
• Column impact analysis — downstream dependents for any column.
• Deep-link URLs for every node, column, and DAG view.
• Any sqlglot dialect, auto-detected from your manifest.
• Scales to 1 000s of models without freezing the browser.
• Fail-soft — an unparseable model is skipped, not fatal.
• Project Health Check across the six dbt-project-evaluator dimensions.
• Versioned deploys with a built-in version switcher, no plugins.
• Full-text search across names, columns, descriptions, tags, and SQL at the client-side, no backend.
• Static REST API (api/v1/) — addressable JSON for every node, lineage, and health, for headless / agent consumption.
• Dark / light theme.

Install

pip install dbdocs --upgrade

Requires Python 3.10+.

Quickstart

dbt docs generate     # writes target/manifest.json + target/catalog.json
dbdocs generate       # builds ./site/ with index.html + dbdocs-data.json.gz
dbdocs serve          # static http server on http://127.0.0.1:8000

The site must be served over HTTP (not opened as a local file) because it fetches the data payload at load time. dbdocs serve handles that locally; any static host works for deployment.

Full walkthrough, configuration, and architecture live in the documentation.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — bugs, features, docs, typos. See the Contributing Guide.

If dbdocs saves you some clicks, consider buying me a coffee.

License

MIT © Dat Nguyen