Release 1.6.0 · kedro-org/kedro

Major features and improvements

Added dataset validation: datasets can declare a validator in their catalog entry, and the DataCatalog enforces it on every load and save.
- Failures raise DataValidationError (a DatasetError subclass), reporting every failed check at once.
- Pandera is the built-in adapter, installed with the new kedro[pandera-pandas] or kedro[pandera-polars] extras; custom validator classes and functions also work.
- The DATASET_VALIDATION setting and the KEDRO_DATASET_VALIDATION environment variable switch validation off.
- validate_dataset and validate_catalog validate on demand, reporting structured ValidationResult outcomes instead of raising.
Added --runner-params to kedro run, allowing runner constructor keyword arguments such as max_workers to be passed from the CLI.
Added the node function name to project inspection snapshots as NodeSnapshot.func_name.
Added node source location metadata (NodeSnapshot.source) to inspection snapshots for displaying node code.
Added optional runtime_params to get_project_snapshot().

Fixed a thread-safety issue in _ProjectPipelines where concurrent access could trigger duplicate pipeline loading or operate on a cleared cache; all shared state mutations are now protected by a reentrant lock.
Fixed a thread-safety issue in the Kedro HTTP server by adding a serving_mode argument to KedroServiceSession.create() that preloads all pipelines upfront.
Fixed a RecursionError when initialising a session with dynaconf-backed settings by converting settings.SESSION_STORE_ARGS to a plain dict before deepcopying it.
Excluded kedro_benchmarks from the built wheel so benchmark tests are no longer shipped with the package.
Fixed get_close_matches returning duplicate suggestions when several inputs matched the same target, and being able to exhaust a one-shot iterable passed as targets.
Fixed docs generated with kedro new --tools=docs so the Sphinx HTML build runs sphinx-apidoc and creates API docs.
Deprecated --async flag for kedro run in favour of --runner-params=is_async=True.
Added a warning in ParallelRunner catalog validation that identifies cloud-backed datasets (e.g. S3, GCS, Azure Data Lake) failing to pickle and suggests using ThreadRunner or SequentialRunner instead.
Redacted credentials, signed-URL query parameters and fragments from dataset filepaths in AbstractDataset.__repr__, DatasetError messages, and HTTP server /snapshot and /run responses.

Added a documentation page for dataset validation.
Documented the HTTP server's restriction on runtime_params-resolved catalog type fields, in the templating guide and the HTTP server guide.
Added a new "Vibe coding with skills" page documenting the kedro-skills plugin.
Added mdformat as a Markdown autoformatter, run via make lint and as a pre-commit hook, and reformatted the existing Markdown. Fixed several step-by-step guides where numbered lists were rendering as repeated "1." instead of counting up, because their content wasn't indented under the right list item.
Fixed the DaskRunner example on the Dask deployment page.
Fixed the open_args_load examples in the data catalog documentation to use text mode so the encoding option applies.
Added a cheatsheet with Kedro concepts and CLI commands to the documentation.

Security fix: A catalog type field resolved with runtime_params supplied through the HTTP server's POST /run no longer accepts an AbstractDataset class chosen by the request. runtime_params-driven type selection through other, trusted callers (for example, kedro run --params) is unaffected.
The settings.py entry RUNNER_MODULES_WHITELIST has been renamed to RUNNER_MODULE_ALLOWLIST, following the <COMPONENT>_ALLOWLIST naming convention for Kedro allowlists. Projects that set the old name must rename it, otherwise the entries are ignored and the HTTP server rejects those runner modules.

Many thanks to the following Kedroids for contributing PRs to this release: