Lightdash Validate

You can check to see if your changes break any of the content in your project using lightdash validate. This command will run the validator which will return a list of content in your project that is broken and details about the errors.

You can trigger a validation on a project using the Lightdash CLI so you can check locally if your changes will break anything. You can also add lightdash validate to your GitHub Actions so changes can’t be merged unless they pass the validation.

Usage

Validate your changes against your project by running lightdash validate

You can run lightdash validate to check if your changes break any of the content in production. By default, lightdash validate will check your changes against the content in the project you’ve selected on the CLI. You can change your project using lightdash config set-project.

lightdash validate

Optionally you can use the --preview argument to validate your last preview environment created from the CLI.

You will get a list of errors if your local files are going to break some content on your project. These errors will not be reflected on the validation table on Lightdash settings.

Validate any project using the project UUID

You can run a validation on any project by specifying the project UUID in the lightdash validate command.

lightdash validate --project <project uuid>

Note: you can get your project UUID from the Lightdash URL by selecting the ID after the projects/

Validate only specific elements of your project

You can select which parts of your project you would like to validate using the --only argument.

lightdash validate --only tables charts dashboards

Available options:

• tables

• charts

• dashboards

Use strict compilation during validation

lightdash validate uses partial compilation by default. Field, join, and set-validation failures that can be isolated are reported as warnings so Lightdash can continue validating the rest of the explore; failures that cannot be isolated can still produce model errors.

Use --no-partial-compilation to report failures normally handled by partial compilation as model errors:

lightdash validate --no-partial-compilation

Tables are included in validation by default, so model errors for tables enabled by your project’s table configuration make the command exit with an error. If you use --only and exclude tables, the compile output can still show ERROR, but only the selected validation targets determine the final exit status. Other generic compilation warnings remain non-blocking.

This replaces the removed PARTIAL_COMPILATION_ENABLED=false environment-variable behavior.

Validate physical column references against the warehouse

Use --validate-warehouse-columns to check supported unquoted ${TABLE}.column references with warehouse queries that return no rows:

lightdash validate --validate-warehouse-columns

Warehouse-column errors remain errors whether partial compilation is enabled or disabled. You can combine both flags for the strictest check:

lightdash validate --validate-warehouse-columns --no-partial-compilation

lightdash validate includes tables by default, so no additional option is required. If you customize --only, keep tables in the list to run the warehouse check; use --only tables when you want to validate tables without charts or dashboards.

The check requires warehouse credentials and the warehouse catalog, and is skipped for dbt Cloud CLI and Lightdash YAML-only compilation. See the CLI reference for supported reference syntax and all skip conditions.

Configure Github actions

This command will create a preview environment, and then validate this preview by specifying --preview on the validate command.lightdash validate will return an error (return code 1) if there is at least 1 validation error on your project. You can use this output to block a deploy on Github actions like this

- name: Start preview
  run: lightdash start-preview
- name: Validate preview
  run: lightdash validate --preview

To learn more about setting up GitHub actions for Lightdash, check out the docs here.