Quick Start

The installation is quick and straightforward.

# airflow needs a home, ~/airflow is the default,
# but you can lay foundation somewhere else if you prefer
# (optional)
export AIRFLOW_HOME=~/airflow

# install from pypi using pip
pip install apache-airflow

# initialize the database
airflow initdb

# if you build with master
airflow users -c --username admin \
              --firstname Peter --lastname Parker \
              --role Admin --email spiderman@superhero.org

# start the web server, default port is 8080
airflow webserver -p 8080

# start the scheduler
airflow scheduler

# visit localhost:8080 in the browser and use the admin account you just
# created to login. Enable the example dag in the home page

Upon running these commands, Airflow will create the $AIRFLOW_HOME folder and lay an “airflow.cfg” file with defaults that get you going fast. You can inspect the file either in $AIRFLOW_HOME/airflow.cfg, or through the UI in the Admin->Configuration menu. The PID file for the webserver will be stored in $AIRFLOW_HOME/airflow-webserver.pid or in /run/airflow/webserver.pid if started by systemd.

Out of the box, Airflow uses a sqlite database, which you should outgrow fairly quickly since no parallelization is possible using this database backend. It works in conjunction with the :class:airflow.executors.sequential_executor.SequentialExecutor which will only run task instances sequentially. While this is very limiting, it allows you to get up and running quickly and take a tour of the UI and the command line utilities.

Here are a few commands that will trigger a few task instances. You should be able to see the status of the jobs change in the example_bash_operator DAG as you run the commands below.

# run your first task instance
airflow run example_bash_operator runme_0 2015-01-01
# run a backfill over 2 days
airflow backfill example_bash_operator -s 2015-01-01 -e 2015-01-02

What’s Next?

From this point, you can head to the Tutorial section for further examples or the How-to Guides section if you’re ready to get your hands dirty.