dbt commands, such as run or test, support their own command-specific CLI flags. In addition, the dbt command itself supports "global" flags applicable to all subcommands.

As of v1.0, the vast majority of global CLI flags map to global configs, which can also be configured via environment variables or in the profiles.yml.

The --version and --record-timing-info flags remain available to the CLI only.

The --version flag returns information about the currently installed version of dbt.

$ dbt --version
installed version: 0.15.1
   latest version: 0.15.1

Up to date!

The -r or --record-timing-info flag saves performance profiling information to a file. This file can be visualized with snakeviz to understand the performance characteristics of a dbt invocation

$ dbt -r timing.txt run
...

$ snakeviz timing.txt