On Linux: respect XDG_CONFIG_HOME and don't store config in user's home directory

Describe the feature

The XDG Base Directory standard states that user config files should respect the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable, which defaults $HOME/.config.

Currently, dbt defaults the PROFILE_DIR to ~/.dbt and doesn’t attempt to read from XDG_CONFIG_HOME or ~/.config.

mv ~/.dbt ~/.config/dbt
dbt debug
...
profiles.yml file [ERROR not found]

Describe alternatives you’ve considered

I can locally symlink my ~/.config/dbt directory to ~/.dbt, but it’s not my preference to put additional directories in my home directory. Alternately, I could set a global DBT_PROFILES_DIR variable.

Additional context

This is only relevant to Linux users. The appdirs pypi package makes the XDG_Base_directory standard simple to implement.

Who will this benefit?

Linux users who have far too many files/folders in their home directories.

[beckjake]

I’m surprised we don’t have an issue about this yet, thanks for writing it up!

I agree, also Windows should write to %APPDATA%\dbt or something like that, and macos should write to ~/Library/Application Support/dbt (I think?). It looks like that library you linked might help on that front.

The problem here is going to be migration. This fix is going to break stuff for a lot of people! We should do it before 1.0. We can fall back to ~/.dbt/profiles.yml if we don’t find it in the os-specific directory. I assume we’ll still get a lot of complaints this way, but better now than later.

[github-actions[bot]]

Although we are closing this issue as stale, it’s not gone forever. Issues can be reopened if there is renewed community interest; add a comment to notify the maintainers.