Looker Continuous Integration

The Looker Continuous Integration (CI) features let you run tests on your LookML project to deliver more reliable, efficient, and user-friendly data experiences. You can use the CI validators to catch issues with SQL, data tests, content, and LookML before they hit production to verify your LookML and prevent query errors for your users. You can also configure the CI validators to run automatically when a pull request is submitted to your LookML repository.

CI is composed of the following validators, which run different checks against your Looker instance:

• SQL Validator — Verifies that the dimensions in your Explores run correctly against your database.
• Assert Validator — Runs any LookML data tests that were created by your Looker developers and returns all failures and errors.
• Content Validator — Runs the Looker content validation to test for errors in the Looks and dashboards in your LookML project.
• LookML Validator — Runs the LookML Validator to test for LookML errors in the project.

To use these validators on your LookML instance, you can create a CI suite, which defines a set of validators and their options that are associated with your LookML project. See the following pages for information on CI suites:

• Creating a Continuous Integration suite
• Running Continuous Integration suites
• Viewing the results of a CI run

Requirements

To use Continuous Integration, you need the following:

• A Looker-hosted instance that is enabled for Continuous Integration.

• A Looker user account with at least one of the following permissions (both of these are included in the Admin permission set):

  • see_ci: required to view the results of CI runs, view the CI Suites page, and run CI suites.
  • manage_ci: required to create CI suites, manage CI users, and configure the Git connection with Continuous Integration.

Enabling Continuous Integration

To enable Continuous Integration, a Looker admin must perform the following tasks:

• Enable the instance for Continuous Integration in the Continuous Integration page of the Looker Admin panel.
• Create a Continuous Integration user.
• Install the CI GitHub app in your GitHub organization. (This is highly recommended for all implementations, and required if you want to use pull requests to trigger CI validation runs).