exit codes should be significant

[drewbanin]

if "errors" occur, dbt should exit with a non-zero exit code.

Exit codes:
0: completed without error
1: completed with handled error (eg. model syntax error, bad permissions, etc)
2: completed with unhandled error

[igrayson]

This is our preferred way to detect when our dbt models are failing.

Today we run regular tasks like dbt as cron jobs, and wrap them in a script to send metrics on duration/exit code for monitoring.

[adamhaney]

That would be perfect, we've started to run dbt with airflow and it would be awesome to be able to have calling scripts know if the command succeeded or not.

[adamhaney]

One more thing, it's not quite clear if there are specific complexities for each command (compile, test, clean, etc). The main ones that introduce hurdles for my team specifically are dbt run and dbt test not returning error codes. We'd really like to be able to run and test in an automated way and respond/notify on failure.