Dagster quickstart
Dagster is a data orchestrator that allows you to define data pipelines in a declarative way. It is a powerful tool that allows you to define the flow of data from source to destination, and to define the transformations that data undergoes along the way.
At OSO, we use Dagster to process data from
various sources,
transform it, and load it into BigQuery. This quickstart guide will help you set
up our Dagster instance locally, with a duckdb backend,
in order to follow along with our tutorials in the next sections.
Setting up Dagster
First, we need to clone the OSO GitHub repository and install the required dependencies.
git clone [email protected]:opensource-observer/oso.git .
Install the dependencies and create a virtual environment with poetry:
poetry install && poetry shell
Now, let's fill the .env file with the required environment variables:
GOOGLE_PROJECT_ID=<your-google-project-id>
DAGSTER_DBT_PARSE_PROJECT_ON_LOAD=1
DAGSTER_HOME=/tmp/dagster-home
After setting the environment variables, Dagster needs $DAGSTER_HOME to be
created before running the Dagster instance.
mkdir /tmp/dagster-home
Lastly, we need to configure dagster.yaml to disable concurrency. Our example
is located at /tmp/dagster-home/dagster.yaml:
This is currently a limitation with our duckdb integration. Please check out
this issue
for more information.
run_queue:
max_concurrent_runs: 1
Running Dagster
Now that we have everything set up, we can run the Dagster instance:
dagster dev
After a little bit of time, you should see the following message:
2024-09-10 22:35:31 +0200 - dagster.daemon - INFO - Instance is configured with the following daemons: ['AssetDaemon', 'BackfillDaemon', 'QueuedRunCoordinatorDaemon', 'SchedulerDaemon', 'SensorDaemon']
2024-09-10 22:35:31 +0200 - dagster-webserver - INFO - Serving dagster-webserver on http://127.0.0.1:3000 in process 1095
Head over to http://localhost:3000 to access Dagster's UI. Et voilà! You have successfully set up Dagster locally.
This is just the beginning. Check out how to create a DLT Dagster Asset next and start building!