About dbt docs commands
dbt docs
has two supported subcommands: generate
and serve
.
dbt docs generate
The command is responsible for generating your project's documentation website by
- Copying the website
index.html
file into thetarget/
directory - Compiling the resources in your project, so that their
compiled_code
will be included inmanifest.json
- Running queries against database metadata to produce the
catalog.json
file, which contains metadata about the tables and views produced by the models in your project.
Example:
dbt docs generate
Use the --no-compile
argument to skip re-compilation. When this flag is provided, dbt docs generate
will skip step (2) described above.
Example:
dbt docs generate --no-compile
dbt docs serve
This command starts a webserver on port 8080 to serve your documentation locally and opens the documentation site in your default browser. The webserver is rooted in your target/
directory. Be sure to run dbt docs generate
before dbt docs serve
because the generate
command produces a catalog metadata artifact that the serve
command depends upon. You will see an error message if the catalog is missing.
Usage:
dbt docs serve [--profiles-dir PROFILES_DIR]
[--profile PROFILE] [--target TARGET]
[--port PORT]
[--no-browser]
You may specify a different port using the --port
flag.
Example:
dbt docs serve --port 8001