[CT-540] [Bug] 'target' suddenly not available at compile time in selectors.yml

[ljhopkins2]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Current Behavior

After upgrading to dbt v1.0.5, I get the following error when compiling my model:

Compilation Error
  Could not render {{ target.name == 'dev' | as_bool }}: 'target' is undefined

Expected Behavior

The project should compile without error, as it did in earlier post-v1 releases.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Add a selector like this to selectors.yml

selectors:
  - name: dev_defer_snapshots
    default: "{{ target.name == 'dev' | as_bool }}"
    definition:
      method: fqn
      value: '*'
      exclude:
        - method: config.materialized
          value: snapshot

2. Compile the project with dbt v1.0.5
3. Note the error
4. Comment out the line containing default: "{{ target.name == 'dev' | as_bool }}"
5. Compile the project
6. Note no error

Relevant log output

No response

Environment

- OS: MacOS 12.3.1
- Python: 3.9.10
- dbt: 1.0.5

What database are you using dbt with?

redshift

Additional Context

No response

[jtcohen6]

@ljhopkins2 Thanks for the report! We'll get on this.

Could it be an unintended side-effect of #4878?

The target-based default use case is an increasingly common one, and it's documented here: https://docs.getdbt.com/reference/node-selection/yaml-selectors/#default

In addition to the fix here, we need a test case for it.

[jtcohen6]

Confirmed that change looks to be the cause. We need our renderers / rendering contexts to be such that:

• packages.yml supports secret env vars, but not target (which isn't set during deps)
• selectors.yml supports target, but not secret env vars

@ljhopkins2 In the meantime, could you work around this by using an env_var instead of target.name?

[ljhopkins2]

@jtcohen6 Thanks for suggesting a workaround. I'll probably just leave it commented out for now, though: short-term I can just remember to --exclude in the dev env; the bigger impact for me was that it was causing cloud jobs to fail, and that was easy to work around with a #!

[gshank]

Using a target context for the selector renderer was introduced in 1.0.0. The secret renderers were passed a context dictionary instead of a cli_var dictionary, so they were broken for var usage. In 1.0.5 we fixed the secret renders so that they were passed a cli_var dictionary instead of the context dictionary, but over-corrected and changed the selector renderer so that it also was just passed a cli_var dictionary. This PR changes the selector rendering to use the DbtProjectYamlRenderer, since the 'render_selectors' call is contained within it and needs the same rendering setup that it has.

[saraleon1]

+1 dbt Cloud enterprise customer. This is resulting in a failure to all jobs due to a failed dbt deps due to a 'target undefined' error

[jtcohen6]

@ljhopkins2 @saraleon1 This fix is now available in v1.0.6-rc1 and v1.1.0-rc3. Those are available in dbt Cloud, respectively, as 1.0 (patch prerelease) and 1.1 (minor prerelease).

Thank you so much for reporting the regression, and helping us get to the bottom of it!