Is there a way to

dbt run --select

and build only those models which have tests, e.g. primary key tests, without explicitly adding YAML tags to the relevant models and filtering by explicit tag selection? Asked on the dbt Slack community but got no suggested solutions.

Not sure if it will work, but you can try with this selectors shown here with

run

instead of `test`https://docs.getdbt.com/reference/commands/test

Unfortunately that doesn't work. The

dbt test

syntax does something useful but

dbt run --select test_type:data

does nothing.

Mmm then I wouldn’t be so sure. You could make a Python script with the

dbt_artifacts_parser

library and go through all tests, and check their

depends_on

field to pick up the model that they depend on and save those models on a list. Afterwards, make a string of all the models and then execute dbt based on that, but I’d say that’s not a pretty solution at all

I suppose another method is to parse the output of both

dbt ls --resource-type model

and

dbt ls --resource-type test

and figure out (within the latter) where the name of a model ends and the name of the column starts.

Yeah, that’s true. You’ll have to find a pattern to match them, though, although usually tests include the name of the model within their id, so a simple regex should suffice. It can be a bit tricky if you have models that have the same name, but partially. Like a model called

users

and another

users_groups

and if

users_groups

has a test, but

users

doesn’t

At least for us, it's possible to run a locally-modified variant of the following SQL to generate a list of models which have primary key tests. Whatever database your artifacts are written to, replace "artifacts_database" with that name. There is admittedly a bit of a chicken-and-egg here; you have to run

dbt run --select elementary

in order to populate the artifact tables, optionally run dbt proper (if you need to build/refresh any models), then run

dbt test

and other parts of your Elementary workflow. (this SQL is Snowflake syntax btw)

I’m glad you found a solution! Just as a side note, since you’re using the alias as the final selection, if the model has a different filename than its alias, it might not run