Getting started

Welcome to the official docs for whale! Whale is an open-source CLI-based data discovery and SQL-runner built and maintained by hyperquery.

Installation

Mac OS

brew install hyperqueryhq/tap/whale

All others (and local development)

You'll need to have rust installed for the following commands to work.

Click here for installation instructions.

If you are not on macOS (or are looking to build whale from source for development purposes), you should (a) clone the whale repository and run (b)make && make install in the base directory of the repo.

git clone https://github.com/dataframehq/whale.git
cd whale/
make && make install

The Makefile commands don't explicitly add an alias for the whale binary, so you'll want to add the following alias to your .bash_profile or .zshrc file.

alias wh=~/.whale/bin/whale

This method is generally preferred for development as well, as the virtual environment is exposed and modifiable in ~/.whale/libexec/env.

Advanced syntax highlighting

We highly recommend installing bat to enable advanced syntax highlighting (once detected, whale will use bat over cat automatically).

Quick start (local usage)

Start by running:

wh init

This will assist you in:

• Setting up the necessary file structure in ~/.whale.

• Setting up your warehouse connection credentials.

• Registering a cron job in your crontab, so whale can periodically scrape metadata.

Once that is complete, either wait for the cron job to run, or run wh pull & to manually kick off a job in the background, if you're feeling impatient.

If you instead want to use a git server like github to back your catalog, see Git setup.

Basic usage

To obtain a list of available commands, run:

wh -h

To run whale's search engine, run:

wh