Continuous deployment in dbt Cloud

To help you improve data transformations and ship data products faster, you can run merge jobs to implement a continuous deployment (CD) workflow in dbt Cloud. Merge jobs can automatically build modified models whenever a pull request (PR) merges, making sure the latest code changes are in production. You don't have to wait for the next scheduled job to run to get the latest updates.

Workflow of continuous deployment in dbt Cloud

You can also implement continuous integration (CI) in dbt Cloud, which can help further to reduce the time it takes to push changes to production and improve code quality. To learn more, refer to Continuous integration in dbt Cloud.

How merge jobs work

When you set up merge jobs, dbt Cloud listens for notifications from your Git provider indicating that a PR has been merged. When dbt Cloud receives one of these notifications, it enqueues a new run of the merge job.

You can set up merge jobs to perform one of the following when a PR merges:

Command to run	Usage description
dbt build --select state:modified+	(Default) Build the modified data with every merge. dbt Cloud builds only the changed data models and anything downstream of it, similar to CI jobs. This helps reduce computing costs and ensures that the latest code changes are always pushed to production.
dbt compile	Refresh the applied state for performant (the slimmest) CI job runs. dbt Cloud generates the executable SQL (from the source model, test, and analysis files) but does not run it. This ensures the changes are reflected in the manifest for the next time a CI job is run and keeps track of only the relevant changes.