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 |
|---|---|---|---|
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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.
- Dark / light theme.
pip install dbdocs --upgradeRequires Python 3.10+.
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://127.0.0.1:8000The 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.
Contributions are welcome — bugs, features, docs, typos. See the Contributing Guide.
If dbdocs saves you some clicks, consider buying me a coffee.
MIT © Dat Nguyen