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Rill Project File

The Rill project file rill.yaml is often overlooked but is a powerful tool as it sets defaults, environmental variables, and connector settings. Let's walk through setting up mock_users to test row access policies, default security settings for your metrics views and explore dashboards, refresh schedules, MCP ai_instructions, and the default OLAP connector.


Project Refresh Schedule​

Setup your project's model refresh schedule. You can override this in the model's YAML file if you need.

models:
    refresh:
        cron: '0 * * * *'

Default OLAP Connector​

When adding an OLAP connector to your project, this will automatically populate with the new OLAP connector. IE: ClickHouse, Druid

ai_instructions​

With our new MCP feature, you may want to pass some project context to the Agent so that it can understand better what this project is used for. A classic example is that this project is a QA project and you dont want to include it in the analysis. In this case, you can add something like below.

ai_instructions: This project is a QA project, do not include this project in any of the MCP calls. If a user asks for this project specifically, always indicate in the answer's header and footer, "This project is a QA project and its number's are not verified. You should not be using this for any purposes other than QA."

Mock Users​

Access to your environment is a crucial step in creating your project in Rill Developer. By doing so, you can confidently push your dashboard changes to Rill Cloud. This is done via the mock_users in the project file. You can create pseudo users with specific domains, or admin and non-admin users or user groups, to ensure that access is correct.

Let's assume that the following are applied to the metrics view.

security:
    access: "{{ .user.admin }} OR '{{ .user.domain }}' == 'example.com'"
    row_filter: "domain = '{{ .user.domain }}'"

In order to test both the access to the dashboard, as well as the row filter, we can create the following in the project YAML.

mock_users:
  - email: royendo@rilldata.com
    admin: true
  - email: your_email@domain.com
    groups:
      - tutorial-admin
  - email: your_email2@another_domain.com

Embedded dashboard Mock Users​

Embedded dashboards are another type of dashboards that you'll want to test in Rill Developer. Mainly because there is no way to pass the custom variables in Rill Cloud to ensure that access and data is being presented correctly. In order to do this, you'll need to add the following to your mock_users:

- email: embed@rilldata.com
  name: embed
  custom_variable_1: Value_1 #this is passed at embed creation
  custom_variable_2: Value_2 #this is passed at embed creation

See our Custom Attributes Embedded dashboard live!

Let's assume a similar set up to the above example. Within the metrics view, we define:

security:
  access: true
  row_filter: >
    app_site_name = '{{ .user.app_site_name }}' AND
      pub_name = '{{ .user.pub_name }}'

Then within the application we are passing

app_site_name='Sling'
pub_name='MobilityWare'

You can do a test mock user to ensure that this dashboard is working as designed with the following:

- email: embed@rilldata.com
  name: embed
  app_site_name: 'Sling' 
  pub_name: 'MobilityWare'

Metrics Views Defaults​

By default, Rill is open to access (to your organization users), unless otherwise defined. To add project-level access to the Rill project, you can add a default metrics view security policy in the rill.yaml file. Like a metrics_view, you can define the security as shown below. For more information, read our dashboard access documentation.

metrics_views:
  security:
    access:
    row_fitler:

Other parameters that can be set in the defaults are first_day_of_week and smallest_time_grain.

Order of Operations

Rill YAML settings < Metrics View YAML

Explore Defaults​

Similar to metrics views, you can set similar security to an explore dashboard. (Note that only access can be set on the dashboard level.)

You are also able to set the defaults parameter in the explores dashboard to define your default time range, as well as the available time_zones and time_ranges in an Explore dashboard.

explores:
    defaults:
        time_range: P3M
    time_zones:
        - America/Denver
        - UTC
    time_ranges:
        - PT24H
        - P7D
        - P14D
        - P3M
Order of Operations

Rill YAML settings < Explore Dashboard YAML < Bookmarks in Rill Cloud < User Last State