Excluding packages or sources/models based on their path#

Note

This section is describing how to entirely exclude models/sources and packages to be evaluated. If you want to ignore results for a specific run, select the resources to check with --select and --exclude (see ignoring resources in a given run). To accept violations for good, see the section on exceptions and if you want to deactivate entire checks you can follow instructions from this page

There might be cases where you want to exclude models/sources from being checked:

they could come from a package for which you have no control over
you might be refactoring your project and wanting to exclude entire folders to follow best-practices in the new models

In that case, this package provides the ability to exclude whole packages and/or models and sources based on their path

Configuration#

The variables exclude_packages and exclude_paths_from_project allow you to define a list of packages and paths to exclude from being reported as errors. Excluded resources are ignored by all the checks.

exclude_packages accepts a list of package names to exclude from the tool, or ["all"] to exclude every package but your own project. Your own project is never excluded, even if you list its name, and the package dbt_project_evaluator itself is always excluded
exclude_paths_from_project accepts a list of strings. A resource is excluded when one of those strings appears in
- its file path (original_file_path), for example models/legacy/ or /my_date_spine.sql, allowing to exclude whole folders or individual models
- or its unique_id, for example raw_crm.contacts to exclude the source table contacts from the source raw_crm, as the path of a source is the YAML file that lists all its tables. In the unique_id, the / characters in the string are removed before looking for a match

Differences with version 1

In version 1, exclude_paths_from_project accepted regular expressions, case-insensitive, and only applied to the resources of the current project. In version 2:

the values are not regular expressions. They are matched literally, as a substring, with the SQL operator LIKE '%<value>%': matching is case-sensitive, and the characters % and _ are wildcards (% for any sequence of characters and _ for exactly one character). In particular, . doesn't mean "any character" anymore
they apply to the resources of all the packages, not only the ones of the current project

exclude_packages works as in version 1, including ["all"].

The same rules apply to exposures, metrics and saved queries: they are excluded when their package, file path or unique_id matches.

Example to exclude a whole package#

dbt_project.yml

vars:
  exclude_packages: ["upstream_package"]

Example to exclude models/sources in a given path#

dbt_project.yml

vars:
  exclude_paths_from_project: ["models/legacy/"]

Example to exclude all the packages#

dbt_project.yml

vars:
  exclude_packages: ["all"]

Example to exclude both a package and models/sources in 2 different paths#

dbt_project.yml

vars:
  exclude_packages: ["upstream_package"]
  exclude_paths_from_project: ["models/legacy/", "/my_date_spine.sql"]

Tips and tricks#

Because the match is a plain substring match, the more specific the value, the better: a short value like legacy also excludes the resources whose unique_id contains legacy. After defining your value for exclude_paths_from_project, we recommend running dbt check and comparing the number of violations reported with the previous run, or checking the resources that are still evaluated with the information schema (see querying the DAG).