Dagster 1.6: UI Upgrades + Dark Mode

Major UI enhancements, Dagster Pipes upgrades and of course, dark mode :-)

An AI generated image of British singer Amy Winehouse coding

Amy Winehouse always used dark mode.

Dagster [1.6 release](https://github.com/dagster-io/dagster/releases/tag/1.5.0) brings some major new enhancements. So, with a nod to [Amy Winehouse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJAfLE39ZZ8), here are the highlights of this release, along with a recap of enhancements in the fourteen sub-releases and 909 commits between 1.5.0 and 1.6.0.

Dagster UI upgrades
New APIs come out of "experimental" status
Dagster Pipes gets some upgrades
And thanks to all the community contributors since 1.5.1

Looking for a more granular list of enhancements?
Check out the full Dagster Changelog.

Dagster UI upgrades

Dagster 1.6 sees some significant upgrades to the UI:

> Josh Braun, lead designer at Dagster Labs, walks us through the UI changes in Dagster 1.6.0

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Dark mode for the Dagster UI: Let's start with the feature that gave this release it's name. By default, Dagster will match your system’s light or dark theme but you can adjust this in the user settings in the top right of the UI.

Second screen shot that illustrates the new Dagster UI dark mode in Dagster 1.6.0. — A screenshot of Dagster's new *dark mode*.

Dagster's asset lineage graph UI has had a facelift to make it easier to visualize and navigate large graphs* Lineage now flows left-to-right instead of top-to-bottom.* You can expand and collapse asset groups in the graph.* A new left-hand sidebar provides a list of assets, organized by asset group and code location.* You can right-click on assets or groups to filter or materialize them.* You can filter by compute kind.

Screen shot that illustrates the new Asset Graph released in Dagster 1.6.0. — A screenshot of the new left-to-right Asset Graph released in Dagster 1.6.

Report asset materializations from the UI: You can now record an asset materialization event without executing the code to materialize the asset. This is useful in cases where you overwrote data outside of Dagster, and you want Dagster to know about it and represent it in the UI. It’s also useful when you have a preexisting partitioned asset and start managing it with Dagster: you want Dagster to show the historical partitions as materialized instead of missing.

Backfill previews: When launching a backfill that covers assets with different partitions, you can now click “Preview” to see that partitions for each asset that will be covered by the backfill.

Triggered Run tracking: Runs triggered by either a sensor or a schedule now link to the tick that triggered them.

Sensor or schedule tick logs accessible by default: Previously, accessing this functionality required turning on a feature flag in user settings.

Screen shot that illustrates triggered run tracking released in Dagster 1.6.0. — A screenshot of the sensor logging released in Dagster 1.6.

New APIs come out of "experimental" status

Speaking of "experimental" features becoming standard, "MaterializeResult, AssetSpec, and AssetDep APIs, introduced in Dagster 1.5, are now marked as "stable". They offer a more straightforward way of defining assets when you don’t want to use I/O managers. Thanks to the early users who helped us field-test this change.

Dagster Pipes

Dagster Pipes were introduced during last October's Launch Week and early adopters are seeing the potential in this new protocol for integrating and launching compute into remote execution environments. Based on early feedback from production users, we continue to invest in this important capability:

Using Dagster Pipes with AWS Lambda is now much easier thanks to the AWS Lambda Pipes client –PipesLambdaClient See the guide for details.
Report arbitrary messages between pipes processes and the orchestrating process – with report_custom_message and get_custom_messages.
Termination forwarding – ensures that external processes terminate when the associated orchestration process is.