Vibe-claudeing a duckdbt CLI

[jwills]

Been playing with the new DuckDB UI stuff and Claude Code a lot this week and cooked up something simple that does what I've always wanted to be able to do with dbt and DuckDB: run the dbt-duckdb process in a shell process where I could simultaneously query the DuckDB instance via a UI and run my dbt-duckdb models in a high-fidelity way, with all of the python model execution and all of the other great stuff we've built in this project over the last few years.

The idea is to create a cli.py and a new duckdbt shell command that uses the dbtRunner construct to load up dbt, parse all of the models in a project using a given profile, and let you run command invocations in the CLI while simultaneously launching the DuckDB UI via a CALL start_ui() call against the instance of DuckDB that gets loaded and configured when dbt debug is called.

[guenp]

This is pretty cool

[b-per]

It worked super well, thanks!
The only thing is that we then lose the shell completion capabilities for models and integrations like https://github.com/Infused-Insight/fzf-dbt

[jwills]

@b-per ah, interesting-- let me see if I can get Claude to add something like that back in...

[dbeatty10]

For anyone that wants to try this out, I did the following steps within a Python virtual environment.

First, cd to a directory on your filesystem that has a dbt project that has a dbt-duckdb connection profile.

If you don't already have one, here's an easy and fast way to get one:

git clone https://github.com/dbt-labs/jaffle_shop_duckdb.git
cd jaffle_shop_duckdb

Then install dbt-duckdb (and dependencies) from source:

python -m pip install git+https://github.com/duckdb/dbt-duckdb.git@master

Note

Once the duckdbt CLI is included in the latest release of dbt-duckdb, then it will be just this instead of installing from source:

python -m pip install --upgrade dbt-duckdb

Then start using this CLI (which will open a window in your default web browser containing the DuckDB UI):

duckdbt

You'll probably need to rearrange your windows so that browser window is stacked on top of your terminal window (or however else you like it).

Then in the terminal you can run your typical dbt sub commands (just drop the dbt prefix):

build
list
build -s stg_customers

And in the DuckDB UI window you can run queries:

select * from stg_customers

[jwills]

Ah @dbeatty10 , nice to see you! Checkout #524 !