Setup Lightdash on your machine in 5 minutes or less!

Lightdash is an easy to setup & use, open-source BI platform for your dbt project. In Lightdash, everything you need for BI is written as code in your dbt project.

The key behind Lightdash is that it allows business users to quickly and effortlessly build dashboards on top of the semantic layer you build in dbt. You use dbt to transform all of the data from your data warehouse, then you use Lightdash to explore it. This article is a quick setup for anyone looking to try out Lightdash, in 5 minutes or less (on your Mac machine).

Pre-requisites

The Lightdash CLI is the recommended way to develop your dbt + Lightdash project. It makes development faster and easier. Before installing Lightdash CLI, you need to have NodeJS/NPM installed on your machine. Go to the terminal, and then run this command install NVM (Node Version Manager) to your system :

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.2/install.sh 

Restart terminal and install NodeJS by running :

nvm install --lts

Verify if NodeJS/NPM is installed by typing the following:

node -v; npm -v;
# it should print something like:
# v16.17.0
# 8.15.0

Step #1: Install Lightdash

Navigate to the directory where your dbt project is created on your machine

cd ../dbt-project

Run the following command to install Lightdash CLI

npm install -g @lightdash/cli

Step #2: Verify if the installation has been completed

All you do is type this command:

lightdash --version

The output should look something like this:

Step #3 - Let's get started

Lightdash is now already installed on your machine. First go to Lightdash, and click on login.

Step #4 - Fill the details

Select the type of warehouse that is used in your dbt project.

After selecting a data warehouse, you will see this pop-up

Copy the login to lightdash command which will look like :

lightdash login https://app.lightdash.cloud --token my-super-secret-token

Step #4 - Run Lightdash

To get your dbt project Lightdash-ready, we need to define all of the columns in your dbt models that we want to explore in Lightdash. Run Lightdash using :

lightdash dbt run

Step #5 - Deploy Lightdash

Now, your dbt project is Lightdash-ready

lightdash deploy --create

That's it - you're already up and running with Lightdash.

Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed this article. This is a series of 5-minute articles for anyone looking to quickly get set up on the tools of the modern data stack.