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Warnings

Use the --warn-error flag to promote all warnings to errors or --warn-error-options for granular control through options.

Use --warn-error to promote all warnings to errors​

Enabling WARN_ERROR config or setting the --warn-error flag will convert all dbt warnings into errors. Any time dbt would normally warn, it will instead raise an error. Examples include --select criteria that selects no resources, deprecations, configurations with no associated models, invalid test configurations, or tests and freshness checks that are configured to return warnings.

Usage
dbt --warn-error run
Proceed with caution in production environments

Using the --warn-error flag or --warn-error-options '{"error": "all"}' will treat all current and future warnings as errors.

This means that if a new warning is introduced in a future version of dbt Core, your production job may start failing unexpectedly. We recommend proceeding with caution when doing this in production environments, and explicitly listing only the warnings you want to treat as errors in production.

Use --warn-error-options for targeted warnings​

In some cases, you may want to convert all warnings to errors. However, when you want some warnings to stay as warnings and only promote or silence specific warnings you can instead use --warn-error-options. The WARN_ERROR_OPTIONS config or --warn-error-options flag gives you more granular control over exactly which types of warnings are treated as errors.

WARN_ERROR and WARN_ERROR_OPTIONS are mutually exclusive

WARN_ERROR and WARN_ERROR_OPTIONS are mutually exclusive. You can only specify one, even when you're specifying the config in multiple places (like env var or a flag), otherwise, you'll see a usage error.

Warnings that should be treated as errors can be specified through error parameter. Warning names can be found in:

  • dbt-core's types.py file, where each class name that inherits from WarnLevel corresponds to a warning name (e.g. AdapterDeprecationWarning, NoNodesForSelectionCriteria).
  • Using the --log-format json flag.

The error parameter can be set to "all" or "*" to treat all warnings as errors (this behavior is the same as using the --warn-error flag), or to a list of specific warning names to treat as exceptions.

  • When error is set to "all" or "*", the optional warn parameter can be set to exclude specific warnings from being treated as exceptions.
  • Use the silence parameter to ignore warnings. To silence certain warnings you want to ignore, you can specify them in the silence parameter. This is useful in large projects where certain warnings aren't critical and can be ignored to keep the noise low and logs clean.

Here's how you can use the --warn-error-options flag to promote specific warnings to errors:

  • Test warnings with the --warn-error-options '{"error": ["LogTestResults"]}' flag.
  • Jinja exception warnings with --warn-error-options '{"error": ["JinjaLogWarning"]}'.
  • No nodes selected with --warn-error-options '{"error": ["NoNodesForSelectionCriteria"]}'.
  • Deprecation warnings with --warn-error-options '{"error": ["Deprecations"]}' (new in v1.10).

Configuration​

You can configure warnings as errors or which warnings to silence, by warn error options through command flag, environment variable, or dbt_project.yml.

You can choose to:

  • Promote all warnings to errors using {"error": "all"} or --warn-error flag.
  • Promote specific warnings to errors using error and optionally exclude others from being treated as errors with --warn-error-options flag. warn tells dbt to continue treating the warnings as warnings.
  • Ignore warnings using silence with --warn-error-options flag.

In the following example, we're silencing the NoNodesForSelectionCriteria warning in the dbt_project.yml file by adding it to the silence parameter:

dbt_project.yml
...
flags:
  warn_error_options:
    error: # Previously called "include"
    warn: # Previously called "exclude"
    silence: # To silence or ignore warnings
      - NoNodesForSelectionCriteria

Examples​

Here are some examples that show you how to configure warn_error_options using flags or file-based configuration.

Target specific warnings​

Some of the examples use NoNodesForSelectionCriteria, which is a specific warning that occurs when your --select flag doesn't match any nodes/resources in your dbt project:

  • This command promotes all warnings to errors, except for NoNodesForSelectionCriteria:

    dbt --warn-error-options '{"error": "all", "warn": ["NoNodesForSelectionCriteria"]}' run

  • This command promotes all warnings to errors, except for deprecation warnings:

    dbt --warn-error-options '{"error": "all", "warn": ["Deprecations"]}' run

  • This command promotes only NoNodesForSelectionCriteria as an error:

    dbt --warn-error-options '{"error": ["NoNodesForSelectionCriteria"]}' run

  • This promotes only NoNodesForSelectionCriteria as an error, using an environment variable:

    DBT_WARN_ERROR_OPTIONS='{"error": ["NoNodesForSelectionCriteria"]}' dbt run

Values for error, warn, and/or silence should be passed on as arrays. For example, dbt --warn-error-options '{"error": "all", "warn": ["NoNodesForSelectionCriteria"]}' run not dbt --warn-error-options '{"error": "all", "warn": "NoNodesForSelectionCriteria"}' run.

The following example shows how to promote all warnings to errors, except for the NoNodesForSelectionCriteria warning using the silence and warn parameters in the dbt_project.yml file:

dbt_project.yml
...
flags:
  warn_error_options:
    error: all # Previously called "include"
    warn:      # Previously called "exclude"
      - NoNodesForSelectionCriteria
    silence:   # To silence or ignore warnings
      - NoNodesForSelectionCriteria

Promote all warnings to errors​

Some examples of how to promote all warnings to errors:

using dbt command flags​
dbt --warn-error run 
dbt --warn-error-options '{"error": "all"}' run 
dbt --warn-error-options '{"error": "*"}' run
using environment variables​
WARN_ERROR=true dbt run 
DBT_WARN_ERROR_OPTIONS='{"error": "all"}' dbt run 
DBT_WARN_ERROR_OPTIONS='{"error": "*"}' dbt run
caution

Note, as mentioned earlier, using warn_error_options: error: "all" will treat all current and future warnings as errors.

This means that if a new warning is introduced in a future version of dbt Core, your production job may start failing unexpectedly. We recommend proceeding with caution when doing this in production environments, and explicitly listing only the warnings you want to treat as errors in production.

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