DBT: Encountered an error while generating catalog: 'dtype'

Question

I am using dbt version 0.19.1.

I have a pipeline that automatically runs dbt docs generate whenever i push some changes to my git repository. From a certain point in time, pipelines started to fail with these error message:

Running with dbt=0.19.1
Found 776 models, 0 tests, 0 snapshots, 0 analyses, 359 macros, 0 operations, 0 seed files, 145 sources, 0 exposures

14:44:45 | Concurrency: 8 threads (target='default')
14:44:45 | 
14:45:07 | Done.
14:45:07 | Building catalog
Encountered an error while generating catalog: 'dtype'
dbt encountered 1 failure while writing the catalog

The problem is that I have many models and changes happening in the source code and it is not easy to understand from this message where the error is coming from. If I check the logs files in the logs folder they are very messy, containing debug information from all the threads, i cannot find the source of the issue.

Is there a way to understand where this issue is coming from? Is it possible to better debug dbt docs generate command?

Thank you all for your replies in advance!

Francesco

Answer 1

Is it possible to better debug dbt docs generate command?

To better debug the issue you can use

dbt --debug docs generate

That will contain the debug information from all the threads, but it should also include a stack trace from where the error was raised.