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Quickstart & Examples

Rill's BI-as-code approach allows you to build and manage dashboards in a codeful way locally + integrate your analytics into other Git processes. This tutorial is a step by step guide that will help you install Rill, ingest sources, model data and deploy a dashboard online.

Example projects

If you're looking for a place to get started, check out one of our example projects which cover a variety of sources and use cases.

Install Rill​

Install rill on Mac or Linux (WSL for Windows users) using the installation script:

curl https://rill.sh | sh
sharing dashboards in Rill cloud? clone your git repo first

If you plan to share your dashboards, it is helpful to start by creating a repo in Git. Go to https://github.com/new to create a new repo. Then, run the Rill install script in your cloned location locally to make deployment easier.

More details on deploying Rill via Git in our Deploy section.

Create your project​

Start a new Rill project:

rill start my-rill-project

The Rill web app runs locally at http://localhost:9009 and will create code files in the my-rill-project directory.

Load and transform data​

On the welcome screen, initialize an example project or load up Rill with your own data (use local files, cloud storage and/or database connections)

Use the app to transform your data (data models) and quickly generate visualizations (dashboards).

Deploy your dashboard​

Once complete, you can deploy any Rill project with a dashboard to an authenticated hosted endpoint:

  1. Create a new Github repository on https://github.com/new and push your my-rill-project directory to it
  2. Setup continuous deployment from Github to Rill Cloud: 
    cd my-rill-project
    rill deploy

Share your dashboard​

Projects on Rill Cloud are private by default. To invite others to explore your project, run:

rill user add

Example Projects​

We have created several example projects that highlight common use cases for Rill.

The monorepo for these examples can be found at: https://github.com/rilldata/rill-examples/

Each example project includes a ReadMe with more details on:

  • Source data in the dataset
  • Dimension and metric definitions
  • Example dashboard analyses

Current projects include:

  • App Engagement: a conversion dataset used by marketers, mobile developers or product teams to analyze funnel steps
  • Cost Monitoring: based off of Rill's own internal dashboards, cloud infrastructure data (compute, storage, pipeline statistics, etc.) merged with customer data to analyze bottlenecks and look for efficiencies
  • GitHub Analytics: analyze GitHub activity to understand what parts of your codebase are most active, analyze contributor productivity, and evaluate the intersections between commits and files
  • Programmatic Ads/OpenRTB: bidstream data for programmtic advertisers to optimize pricing strategies, look for inventory opportunities, and improve campaign performance
  • 311 Operations: a live datastream of 311 call centers from various locations in the US for example operational analytics

Installing Examples​

You can install rill using our installation script:

curl https://rill.sh | sh

To run an example (in this case our Programmatic/OpenRTB dataset):

git clone https://github.com/rilldata/rill-examples.git
cd rill-examples/rill-openrtb-prog-ads
rill start

Rill will build your project from data sources to dashboard and then launch in a new browser window.

We want to hear from you​

You can file an issue on GitHub or reach us in our Discord channel. If you want to contact Rill Support, please see our Contact page for additional options.