Creating a components-ready Dagster project

info

dg and Dagster Components are under active development. You may encounter feature gaps, and the APIs may change. To report issues or give feedback, please join the #dg-components channel in the Dagster Community Slack.

The create-dagster CLI allows you to create a special type of Python package, called a project, that defines a Dagster code location.

Prerequisites

Before creating a project, you must install create-dagster. If you're using uv, you can run create-dagster using uvx, without needing to install it first.

Creating a project

uv

uvx -U create-dagster project my-project

Homebrew, curl, or pip

create-dagster project my-project

Project structure

The create-dagster project command creates a directory with a standard Python package structure with some additions:

uv

tree

.
├── pyproject.toml
├── src
│   └── jaffle_platform
│       ├── __init__.py
│       └── defs
│           └── __init__.py
├── tests
│   └── __init__.py
└── uv.lock

5 directories, 5 files

pip

tree

.
├── pyproject.toml
├── src
│   └── jaffle_platform
│       ├── __init__.py
│       └── defs
│           └── __init__.py
└── tests
    └── __init__.py

5 directories, 4 files

tip

To use tree, install it with brew install tree (Mac), or follow the installation instructions.

• The Python package my_project lives in src/my_project and contains the deployable code that defines your Dagster pipelines.
• my_project/defs will contain your Dagster definitions.
• my_project/components is where you will define custom component types, and optionally other code you wish to share across Dagster definitions.
• my_project/definitions.py is the entry point that Dagster will load when deploying your code location. It is configured to load all definitions from my_project/defs. You should not need to modify this file.
• tests is a separate Python package defined at the top level (outside src). It should contain tests for the my_project package.
• pyproject.toml is a standard Python package configuration file. In addition to the regular Python package metadata, it contains a tool.dg section for dg-specific settings.