[CT-2372] [Feature] Any interest in a dbt manifest command?

[jsnb-devoted]

Is this your first time submitting a feature request?

• I have read the expectations for open source contributors
• I have searched the existing issues, and I could not find an existing issue for this feature
• I am requesting a straightforward extension of existing dbt functionality, rather than a Big Idea better suited to a discussion

Describe the feature

We use the manifest for CI and auxiliary tooling and we have been doing dbt compile to generate it. I'm now just realizing that we are wasting time doing a compile for just the manifest. It is handy that the doc has the list of commands that will generate the manifest but it feels a tad odd to be doing a dbt ls just so I can generate the manifest byproduct.

Describe alternatives you've considered

dbt ls is totally fine -- I could just see us writing things in our code like:

# don't actually need to `ls` -- we just want the manifest
dbt ls

Who will this benefit?

Just folks that use the manifest directly for metadata/tooling/CI etc

Are you interested in contributing this feature?

Sure -- I think I could pattern match my way around it if there is a single function that generates the manifest.

Anything else?

No response

[jsnb-devoted]

Just thinking about this now after I submitted this but I could also see the dbt parse --generate-manifest flag as a suitable ux.

[jtcohen6]

@jsnb-devoted Definitely interest - dbt parse will start doing this by default in v1.5!

(dbt parse --write-manifest in older versions)

See also:

• [CT-1767] [Feature] dbt parse should return a manifest #6547

[jsnb-devoted]

get out of town! thanks @jtcohen6 -- and there it is in the help dialogue for dbt parse!