zdbt is a personal dbt IDE built as a fork of Zed (zed-industries/zed, forked at tag v1.17.2). It adds first-class, native dbt support directly into the editor — no webviews, all GPUI.

This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Zed Industries or dbt Labs. "Zed" and "dbt" are trademarks of their respective owners.

Download

Prebuilt, unsigned binaries are on the releases page — macOS Apple Silicon .dmg, Linux x86_64 .tar.gz, Windows x86_64 installer — and the project site is at arezki1990.github.io/dbt-zed. Builds use the dev release channel, so they install alongside official Zed and never auto-update over it. On macOS, right-click → Open the first time (the build is unsigned).

Features

• dbt SQL language — Jinja-aware SQL highlighting via a Jinja host grammar with combined SQL injection; the default for all .sql files.
• Language server — prefers dbt Fusion's dbt lsp (go-to-definition, hover, completions, diagnostics), falls back to the community Go dbt-language-server with auto-download. Includes a workaround for a Fusion LSP bug where the server exits on workspace/didChangeConfiguration.
• dbt results panel (bottom dock):
  • Run the current model or a selected SQL chunk with cmd+enter (dbt show, Jinja compiled), results in a data grid with sorting, live search, column show/hide, smooth resizable columns, pinned row numbers, horizontal scrolling, and CSV export.
  • Compiled SQL view in a read-only, syntax-highlighted editor.
  • Interactive lineage graph — React-Flow-style canvas: layered layout with crossing reduction, materialization colors, per-node collapse handles, node dragging, whole-graph panning, semantic zoom with scaling text, column-level lineage with click-to-highlight transformation paths, and a collapsible upstream/downstream tree. Backed by a sqlitegraph database built from target/manifest.json + catalog.json.
  • Browse-driven: opening any model recenters the lineage; clicking graph nodes opens files.
• Project automation — auto-discovers nested dbt projects (dbt_project.yml anywhere in the repo), in-project profiles (local_profiles/, profiles/, .dbt/), .env/.env.local files up to the repo root (loaded only into the dbt process environment), and runs dbt parse + dbt compile --write-catalog on first open.
• Settings page — a "dbt" page in Zed's settings UI: show limit, dbt binary, target, profiles dir, project dir, env file, parse-on-load, and lineage depth/node caps.

Requirements

• macOS (Apple Silicon tested), Rust via rustup, cmake.
• A user-installed dbt: dbt Fusion (recommended) or dbt Core + the Go language server. dbt is not bundled or redistributed by this project; it runs from your PATH under dbt Labs' own license.

Building

cargo build -p zed --features gpui_platform/runtime_shaders
ZED_RELEASE_CHANNEL=dev ./target/debug/zed /path/to/your/dbt/project

(runtime_shaders avoids requiring the Xcode Metal offline toolchain.)

Upstream build docs: macOS, Linux, Windows.

License

Like upstream Zed, this repository is licensed GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE-GPL — with Apache-2.0 components where marked (see LICENSE-APACHE). Vendored third-party code:

• vendor/sqlitegraph — GPL-3.0-only (see its LICENSE and MODIFICATIONS.md); this pins the combined distribution to GPL version 3.
• vendor/tree-sitter-jinja2 — MIT (see its LICENSE).

Other added dependencies (layout-rs, tree-sitter-sequel, rusqlite) are MIT-licensed from crates.io.

If you distribute binaries of this fork: rename the product and replace the icon (the Zed name/logo are trademarks not covered by the GPL), and disable auto-update so builds don't replace themselves with official Zed.

MCP server (agents)

The binary doubles as an MCP server: zdbt --dbt-mcp speaks MCP over stdio, exposing dbt_list_models, dbt_model_info, dbt_lineage, dbt_column_lineage, dbt_show, and dbt_compile.

Inside zdbt no setup is needed: any workspace containing a dbt project auto-registers the built-in dbt context server for the agent panel (your own context_servers.dbt entry overrides it). For external MCP clients, point them at the binary yourself:

"context_servers": {
  "dbt": {
    "source": "custom",
    "command": "/Applications/zdbt.app/Contents/MacOS/zdbt",
    "args": ["--dbt-mcp"]
  }
}

Any MCP client works — e.g. Claude Code: claude mcp add dbt -- /Applications/zdbt.app/Contents/MacOS/zdbt --dbt-mcp.