Set up local

This will set up Dagster for you local machine. If you would prefer to do this course in Github Codespaces, please follow that guide.

• To install git. Refer to the Git documentation if you don’t have this installed.
• To have Python installed. Dagster supports Python 3.9 - 3.12.
• To install a package manager. To manage the python packages, we recommend uv which Dagster uses internally.

Clone the Dagster University project

Clone the Github repository. The command will depend on if you choose to clone with ssh or https.

ssh

git clone git@github.com:dagster-io/project-dagster-university.git

https

git clone https://github.com/dagster-io/project-dagster-university.git

After cloning the Dagster University project, you’ll want to navigate to specific course within the repository.

cd dagster_university/dagster_essentials

Install uv and dg

Now we want to install dg. This is the command line interface that makes it easy to interact with Dagster. Throughout the course we will use dg to scaffold our project and streamline the development process.

In order to best use dg we will need the Python package manager uv. uv will allow us to install dg globally and more easily build our virtual environments.

If you do not have uv instead already, you can do so with:

brew install uv

Now you can use uv to install dg globally:

uv tool install dagster-dg

Install the dependencies

With uv and dg set, we can create the virtual environment specific to this course. All of the dependencies are maintained in the pyproject.toml (you will not need to edit anything in that project for this course). To create the virtual environment, run:

uv sync

This will create a virtual environment and install all the necessary dependencies. To activate this virtual environment:

source .venv/bin/activate

To ensure everything is working you can launch the Dagster UI.

dg dev