Install from source

dbt Core and almost all of its adapter plugins are open source software. As such, the codebases are freely available to download and build from source. You might install from source if you want the latest code or want to install dbt from a specific commit. This might be helpful when you are contributing changes, or if you want to debug a past change.

To download from source, you would clone the repositories from GitHub, making a local copy, and then install the local version using pip.

Downloading and building dbt Core will enable you to contribute to the project by fixing a bug or implementing a sought-after feature. For more details, read the contributing guidelines.

Installing dbt Core

Beginning in v1.8, installing an adapter does not automatically install dbt-core. This is because adapters and dbt Core versions have been decoupled from each other so we no longer want to overwrite existing dbt-core installations

To install in editable mode, which includes your local changes as you make them:

python -m pip install -e editable-requirements.txt` instead.

Installing adapter plugins

To install an adapter plugin from source, you will need to first locate its source repository. For instance, the dbt-redshift adapter is located at https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-redshift.git, so you can clone it and install from there:

git clone https://github.com/dbt-labs/dbt-redshift.git
cd dbt-redshift
python -m pip install .

To install in editable mode, such as while contributing, use python -m pip install -e . instead.