Have you ever changed a dbt model or a data contract only to later find it broke a downstream table or dashboard? 💔

We've created a GitHub Action to help you out — putting Atlan's impact analysis right into your pull request. So now, before merging the PR, you can see the potential downstream impact of your changes.

Here's what it looks like 👇

• Atlan API token → before you can run the action, you need an Atlan API token.
• Default Write Permission for GITHUB_TOKEN -> Grant read and write permissions to the GITHUB_TOKEN in your repository to allow the atlan-action to seamlessly add or update comments on pull requests. For more details, refer to the GitHub documentation.

1. Create repository secrets in your repository:

   • ATLAN_INSTANCE_URL with the URL of your Atlan instance.
   • ATLAN_API_TOKEN with the value of the API token.

   

2. Add the GitHub Action to your workflow:

   1. Create a workflow file in your repository: .github/workflows/atlan-impact-analysis.yml

   2. Add the following code to the workflow file:

      name: Atlan action
      
      on:
        pull_request:
          types: [opened, edited, synchronize, reopened, closed]
      
      jobs:
        get-downstream-impact:
          name: Get Downstream Assets
          runs-on: ubuntu-latest
          steps:
            - name: Checkout
              uses: actions/checkout@v4
      
            - name: Run Action
              uses: atlanhq/atlan-action@v1
              with:
                GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}
                ATLAN_INSTANCE_URL: ${{secrets.ATLAN_INSTANCE_URL}}
                ATLAN_API_TOKEN: ${{secrets.ATLAN_API_TOKEN}}
                # Add ATLAN_CONFIG to run impact analysis on contracts
                ATLAN_CONFIG: .atlan/config.yaml

After you've completed the configuration above, create a pull request with a changed dbt model or data contract file to run the action. You should see the Atlan action running and then adding comments in your pull request:

• The action will add and update a single comment for every file change.
• The impacted assets in the comment will be displayed in a collapsible section and grouped by source and asset type.
• The comment will include some metadata for your impacted assets — such as descriptions, owners, and linked glossary terms.
• View the impacted assets in Atlan or open the source URL — for example, view an impacted Looker dashboard directly in Looker.

In case there are multiple dbt models in your Atlan instance with the same name but in different environments, the action may get the wrong model. To fix this, you can map Github branch with specific dbt environment, if you do this - Atlan Github action will pick lineage for that specific environment from Atlan. You can provide the mapping like branch name: dbt nvironment name

jobs:
  get-downstream-impact:
    name: Get Downstream Assets
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Run Action
        uses: atlanhq/atlan-action@v1
        with:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}
          ATLAN_INSTANCE_URL: ${{secrets.ATLAN_INSTANCE_URL}}
          ATLAN_API_TOKEN: ${{secrets.ATLAN_API_TOKEN}}
+         DBT_ENVIRONMENT_BRANCH_MAP: |
+           main: dbt-prod
+           beta: dbt-test

By default the action checks if there's an alias defined for a model in the code and looks for the relevant asset in Atlan using that alias. You can turn off matching alias name using this input IGNORE_MODEL_ALIAS_MATCHING input to true. For example:

jobs:
  get-downstream-impact:
    name: Get Downstream Assets
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Run Action
        uses: atlanhq/atlan-action@v1
        with:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}
          ATLAN_INSTANCE_URL: ${{secrets.ATLAN_INSTANCE_URL}}
          ATLAN_API_TOKEN: ${{secrets.ATLAN_API_TOKEN}}
+         IGNORE_MODEL_ALIAS_MATCHING: true