Preview local changes

Preview projects are temporary Lightdash projects where you can safely experiment with your metrics, dimensions and charts without affecting your production project.

Preview projects will copy all spaces/charts/dashboards into your new preview project, so you can test the content and also run validation. This is only copied on preview creation, you can’t sync the content afterwards.

Run lightdash preview from inside your project

# This will create a preview and will wait until you press a key to delete the preview project
lightdash preview

or

# This will create a preview and exit, you will have to run lightdash stop-preview to delete it
lightdash start-preview

Then cmd + click to open the preview link from your terminal. Once you’re in Lightdash go to Explore —> Tables, then click on the model(s) you just updated to see your changes and play around with them.

Updating your preview while it’s running

While your preview is running, you can run dbt compile in a separate terminal session to update your dbt models. After compiling, refresh your browser to see the changes in Lightdash. Note that this is not a hot reload - you need to manually refresh the page.

Problems with credentials?

When you create preview projects, Lightdash will use the same warehouse connection settings you have in your profiles.yml file for your current dbt project. This can be a problem if you’re using a local database that your laptop can reach but your Lightdash instance cannot.