Admin settings - Continuous Integration

The Continuous Integration page in the Platform section of the Admin menu lets you configure settings for the Looker Continuous Integration (CI) feature.

Enable Continuous Integration

The Looker Continuous Integration (CI) feature lets 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 test, 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.

A Looker admin can use the Enable Continuous Integration toggle to enable Continuous Integration on your instance.

Continuous Integration users

A Continuous Integration (CI) user is a Looker user account that is set aside for Continuous Integration use only; it is used to authenticate CI runs.

To add a Continuous Integration user, follow these steps:

  1. Create a Looker user account with develop permissions. This account must be used for Continuous Integration only.
  2. Generate API keys for the account, and copy the API's Client ID and Client Secret.
  3. On the Continuous Integration admin page in Looker, add the user:
    • Click the Add user button.
    • Paste in the Client ID and Client Secret values from the API keys you generated.
    • Click the Test connection button.
    • If the test is successful, click the Add user button to add the Continuous Integration user.

The Looker user that you've set aside for Continuous Integration is now associated with Continuous Integration, and the Client ID of the user account is now displayed in the Continuous Integration users section.

Integrations

If you use GitHub as a remote repository for your LookML project, you can configure Continuous Integration to automatically run CI suites when LookML developers submit pull requests to your LookML repository. To automatically run CI suites on your repository, Continuous Integration needs the following permissions:

  • Read access to your repository's metadata and pull requests
  • Read and write access to your repository's commit statuses, repository hooks, and workflows

These permissions are not set up when you set up a Git connection for your LookML project in the Looker IDE. If you want to use pull request triggering for CI runs, your LookML project must be set up with a Git connection (as described on the Setting up and testing a Git connection page), and you must also configure the CI GitHub app as described in this section.

To configure the CI GitHub app, follow these steps:

  1. On the Continuous Integration admin page in Looker, click the Configure GitHub App button. This will open a browser window to the GitHub apps webpage.
  2. Select the GitHub account where your LookML is stored.
  3. In the Repository access section, select All repositories to allow CI integrations for all of the Git repositories owned by the resource owner, or select Only select repositories to choose the repositories with which you want to use Continuous Integration.
  4. Click Save.

If the connection is successful, the GitHub section of the Continuous Integration admin page in Looker will display a green Connected box.