Yes — and in Prefect 3.x the recommended way is to let dbt read credentials from environment variables in

profiles.yml

, while Prefect resolves the secret values for you. Short version: - Put credentials in Prefect Secret blocks - Reference them in

profiles.yml

- Run with

PrefectDbtRunner

- Prefect will resolve those references and provide them to dbt via

env_var(...)

Docs: - Prefect dbt runner guide - profiles.yml templating - dbt env_var docs Example `profiles.yml`:

yaml
my_project:
  target: dev
  outputs:
    dev:
      type: postgres
      host: "{{ prefect.blocks.secret.db-host }}"
      user: "{{ prefect.blocks.secret.db-user }}"
      password: "{{ prefect.blocks.secret.db-password }}"
      dbname: analytics
      schema: public
      threads: 4

Then in Prefect:

python
from pathlib import Path
from prefect import flow
from prefect_dbt import PrefectDbtRunner, PrefectDbtSettings

@flow
def run_dbt():
    settings = PrefectDbtSettings(
        project_dir=Path("./my_dbt_project"),
        profiles_dir=Path.home() / ".dbt",
    )

    runner = PrefectDbtRunner(settings=settings)
    runner.invoke(["build"])

What happens under the hood: - Prefect reads

profiles.yml

- It resolves

{{ prefect.blocks... }}

references - It rewrites them into dbt-style

{{ env_var('...') }}

- It sets those env vars for the dbt invocation So yes: you can use environment variables safely without manually writing a credentials file yourself. If you prefer, you can also set env vars directly before invoking dbt:

python
import os
from prefect_dbt import PrefectDbtRunner

os.environ["DBT_PASSWORD"] = "secret"

PrefectDbtRunner().invoke(["build"])

and use:

yaml
password: "{{ env_var('DBT_PASSWORD') }}"

But for Prefect-managed runs, Secret blocks are the better pattern. A couple of notes: -

PrefectDbtRunner

is the current API in Prefect 3.x. - You can control

project_dir

and

profiles_dir

through

PrefectDbtSettings

. - You do not need to manually manage a special context manager;

invoke()

handles that internally. If you want, I can also show a complete example for Snowflake, Postgres, or BigQuery credentials.