Introduction to Airflow
Apache Airflow is an open source tool for programmatically authoring, scheduling, and monitoring data pipelines. It has over 9 million downloads per month and an active OSS community. Airflow allows data practitioners to define their data pipelines as Python code in a highly extensible and infinitely scalable way.
DAGs
How to write your first DAG in Apache Airflow
Operators
Operators are the building blocks of Airflow DAGs. They contain the logic of how data is processed in a pipeline. Each task in a DAG is defined by instantiating an operator.
The Airflow UI
An overview of the Airflow UI
Schedule DAGs
One of the fundamental features of Apache Airflow is the ability to schedule jobs. Historically, Airflow users scheduled their DAGs by specifying a schedule with a cron expression, a timedelta object, or a preset Airflow schedule. Timetables, released in Airflow 2.2, allow users to create their own custom schedules using Python, effectively eliminating the limitations of cron. With timetables, you can now schedule DAGs to run at any time. Datasets, introduced in Airflow 2.4, let you schedule your DAGs on updates to a dataset rather than a time-based schedule. For more information about datasets, see Datasets and Data-Aware Scheduling in Airflow.
Sensors
Apache Airflow sensors are a special kind of operator that are designed to wait for something to happen. When sensors run, they check to see if a certain condition is met before they are marked successful and let their downstream tasks execute. When used properly, they can be a great tool for making your DAGs more event driven.
Connections
Connections in Airflow are sets of configurations used to connect with other tools in the data ecosystem. Because most hooks and operators rely on connections to send and retrieve data from external systems, understanding how to create and configure them is essential for running Airflow in a production environment.
Hooks
A hook is an abstraction of a specific API that allows Airflow to interact with an external system. Hooks are built into many operators, but they can also be used directly in DAG code.
BashOperator
The BashOperator is one of the most commonly used operators in Airflow. It executes bash commands or a bash script from within your Airflow DAG.
Run SQL
Executing SQL queries is one of the most common use cases for data pipelines. Whether you're extracting and loading data, calling a stored procedure, or executing a complex query for a report, Airflow has you covered. Using Airflow, you can orchestrate all of your SQL tasks elegantly with just a few lines of boilerplate code.
Task dependencies
Dependencies are a powerful and popular Airflow feature. In Airflow, your pipelines are defined as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). Each task is a node in the graph and dependencies are the directed edges that determine how to move through the graph. Because of this, dependencies are key to following data engineering best practices because they help you define flexible pipelines with atomic tasks.
Manage Airflow code
One of the tenets of Apache Airflow is that pipelines are defined as code. This allows you to treat your pipelines as you would any other piece of software and use best practices such as version control and CI/CD. As you scale the use of Airflow within your organization, it becomes important to manage your Airflow code in a way that is organized and sustainable.
OpenLineage
Learn about OpenLineage concepts and benefits of integrating with Airflow.