Selecting all nodes but only tests for modified relations

[jeffkeller-einc]

I have a dbt project where creating the relations is fairly quick but running all tests is beginning to add significant time to my CI / CD pipeline. I'd like to streamline it by creating all relations but only running the tests on modified relations and their ancestors / descendants.

I know I can achieve this by sequencing dbt commands like this:

dbt seed
dbt run
dbt test --select "@state:modified" --state ...

But I would really like to capture all of this in a single selector that I can pass to dbt build so that I can:

1. Condense these steps into a single dbt build command
2. Run a single dbt retry if needed
3. Have the tests run before descendant nodes are created

I tried this:

dbt ls --exclude "state:unmodified,resource_type:test" --state ...

But this excludes all tests. I think this is because all tests are considered nodes as well and while their parent model may have changed, they have not changed themselves and so are excluded.