Use SQL Linter

October 18, 2025

I saw this at https://villoro.com/blog/dbt-testing-duckdb/

The linting job takes between a few seconds to a few minutes. You must decide if you are willing to spend that time prior to each commit to ensure properly linted SQL code. If not, do not set pre-commit.

To set up sqlfluff, you only need to add these lines to the .pre-commit-config.yaml file:

.pre-commit-config.yaml

repos:

# SQL linter
- repo: https://github.com/sqlfluff/sqlfluff
  rev: 3.0.6
  hooks:
  - id: sqlfluff-lint
    entry: sqlfluff lint --processes 0 --disable-progress-bar
    additional_dependencies: [ # Should match what we have in prod
      'dbt-duckdb==1.6.2',
      'sqlfluff-templater-dbt==3.0.6'
    ]
  - id: sqlfluff-fix
    entry: sqlfluff fix --show-lint-violations --processes 0 --disable-progress-bar
    additional_dependencies: [ # Should match what we have in prod
      'dbt-duckdb==1.6.2',
      'sqlfluff-templater-dbt==3.0.6'
    ]

Here we are using 2 jobs:

sqlfluff-lint: this gives better information about the failures.
sqlfluff-fix: this tries to fix the errors. It doesn’t always succeed.

Bash trick: using grep for faster history search How to Version in pyproject