unit test not seeing project variable

Help
1

The problem I’m having

I have a model that uses a a project level variable to set a variable value in the model. When I compile, all is well. When I run dbt test (which includes unit tests) I get an error that. the var value is not recognized.

in dbt_project.yml

vars:
   min_speed: 5

at the top of my model file, I have. Basically setting a number of hours (at the minimum speed) to get to a total value of 50.

{%  set hours_to_look_ahead_ceil =  ((50 / var('min_speed') | round(method='ceil')) | int) %}

When I run dbt test --select model
I get the following error:

Finished running 1 unit test in 0 hours 0 minutes and 2.61 seconds (2.61s).
14:22:17  
14:22:17  Completed with 1 error and 0 warnings:
14:22:17  
14:22:17    Compilation Error in unit_test test_mrt__[[model name]]  (models/_properties.yml)
  'var' is undefined. This can happen when calling a macro that does not exist. Check for typos and/or install package dependencies with "dbt deps".
14:22:17  
14:22:17  Done. PASS=0 WARN=0 ERROR=1 SKIP=0 TOTAL=1

The context of why I’m trying to do this

We have project level decisions set at project variables. I am honoring this hierarchy in my work.

What I’ve already tried

I attempted to move the variable setting lower int he model script. I also attempted to create a macro that sets this value - however then I ran into a different issue (I use this variable as the max in a for loop range

{%- for n in range(1, hours_to_look_ahead_ceil ) %} 
   [[some code ]] 
{% endfor %}

And this does not want to accept a macro call as an input.

Some example code or error messages

included above.

2

The variable was not identified due to the description: in the “dbt_project.yml” it is listed as “min_speed” but in the variable it is “mins_speed”. Please maintain the same nomenclature.

3

Thanks for catching the copy paste error - but that is not present in the code itself (the code compiles and runs fine - it just cannot run tests).

As is best practice, my macros and variables have descriptive names - too descriptive for posting in a public forum so that variable name is only for the mock code for this post.