Running your dbt models via Dagster UI

📘 Introduction

In this hands-on tutorial, we’ll walk you step-by-step through running dbt models directly from the Dagster UI. By integrating dbt with Dagster, you gain an easy way to orchestrate, run, and monitor your models — all from a clean web interface.

✅ Prerequisites

🐍☑️ Installed Python
📦☑️Installed Pip
🌐☑️ Created a virtual environment (venv)
🗂️☑️ A dbt project set up
🧪☑️ Existing dbt models defined in your models/ directory
🐙☑️ Created a Dagster project within your dbt project
🚀☑️ Run Dagster with your dbt project locally

🗂️ Models in our dbt project

In this tutorial, we’re working with a dbt project called dlnerds_university. The project contains several dbt models and a Dagster project named dlnerds_university_dagster.

💻 1️⃣ Open the Dagster UI

After running Dagster locally, open your browser and navigate to:

👉 http://127.0.0.1:3000

This brings up the Dagster UI.

🚀2️⃣ Run a dbt model via Dagster UI

Navigate to Assets. Here your dbt models (registered as assets) appear.

Let's have a look at the models in the bronze layer. We would like to run the model cleaned_course. Select the model and click on Materialize selected.