How do I run DBT models from a Python script or program?

Question

I have a DBT project, and a python script will be grabbing data from the postgresql to produce output.

However, part of the python script will need to make the DBT run. I haven't found the library that will let me cause a DBT run from an external script, but I'm pretty sure it exists. How do I do this?

ETA: The correct answer may be to download the DBT CLI and then use python system calls to use that.... I was hoping for a library, but I'll take what I can get.

Answer 1

Update for dbt Fusion

As of Nov, 2025, dbt Fusion does not yet support programmatic invocation from Python. Continue to use dbt Core for this (see below). See this tracking issue for the current status.

Update: v1.5 has arrived!

With v1.5 of dbt, we get a stable and officially supported Python API for invoking dbt operations; this API has functional parity with the CLI.

From the docs:

from dbt.cli.main import dbtRunner, dbtRunnerResult

# initialize
dbt = dbtRunner()

# create CLI args as a list of strings
cli_args = ["run", "--select", "tag:my_tag"]

# run the command
res: dbtRunnerResult = dbt.invoke(cli_args)

# inspect the results
for r in res.result:
    print(f"{r.node.name}: {r.status}")

There are some caveats about the stability of artifacts returned by dbt.invoke; read the docs for more details.

Original Answer

(As of Jan 2023) There is not a public Python API for dbt, yet. It is expected in v1.5, which should be out in a couple months.

Right now, your safest option is to use the CLI. If you don't want to use subprocess, the CLI uses Click now, and Click provides a runner that you can use to invoke Click commands. It's usually used for testing, but I think it would work for your use case, too. The CLI command is here. That would look something like:

from click.testing import CliRunner
from dbt.cli.main import run

dbt_runner = CliRunner()
dbt_runner.invoke(run, args="-s my_model")

You could also invoke dbt the way they do in the test suite, using run_dbt.