Apache Airflow - A platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows
Apache Airflow - A platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows
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Apache Airflow (or simply Airflow) is a platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows.
When workflows are defined as code, they become more maintainable, versionable, testable, and collaborative.
Use Airflow to author workflows (Dags) that orchestrate tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command line utilities make performing complex surgeries on Dags a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress, and troubleshoot issues when needed.
Table of contents
Airflow works best with workflows that are mostly static and slowly changing. When the Dag structure is similar from one run to the next, it clarifies the unit of work and continuity. Other similar projects include Luigi, Oozie and Azkaban.
Beyond traditional data pipelines, Airflow is widely used to orchestrate machine learning workflows — training, retraining, evaluation, and deployment — and increasingly to orchestrate agentic and LLM-based workloads, coordinating the steps of an AI pipeline (data prep, tool calls, model invocation, evaluation) rather than acting as the agent itself. This isn't a new direction: teams have run ML and AI workloads on Airflow for years, and the ecosystem of providers supporting these use cases (see the AI & ML section of the Airflow registry) continues to grow.
Airflow is commonly used to process data, but has the opinion that tasks should ideally be idempotent (i.e., results of the task will be the same, and will not create duplicated data in a destination system), and should not pass large quantities of data from one task to the next (though tasks can pass metadata using Airflow's XCom feature). For high-volume, data-intensive tasks, a best practice is to delegate to external services specializing in that type of work.
Airflow is not a streaming solution, but it is often used to process real-time data, pulling data off streams in batches.
Apache Airflow is tested with:
| Main version (dev) | Stable version (3.3.0) | Deprecate version (2.11.2) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Python | 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.14 | 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.14 | 3.10, 3.11, 3.12 |
| Platform | AMD64/ARM64 | AMD64/ARM64 | AMD64/ARM64(*) |
| Kubernetes | 1.30, 1.31, 1.32, 1.33, 1.34, 1.35 | 1.30, 1.31, 1.32, 1.33, 1.34, 1.35 | 1.26, 1.27, 1.28, 1.29, 1.30 |
| PostgreSQL | 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 | 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 | 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 |
| MySQL | 8.0, 8.4, Innovation | 8.0, 8.4, Innovation | 8.0, Innovation |
| SQLite | 3.15.0+ | 3.15.0+ | 3.15.0+ |
* Experimental
Note: MariaDB is not tested/recommended.
Note: SQLite is used in Airflow tests. Do not use it in production. We recommend using the latest stable version of SQLite for local development.
Note: Airflow currently can be run on POSIX-compliant Operating Systems. For development, it is regularly
tested on fairly modern Linux Distros and recent versions of macOS.
On Windows you can run it via WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2) or via Linux Containers.
The work to add Windows support is tracked via #10388, but
it is not a high priority. You should only use Linux-based distros as "Production" execution environment
as this is the only environment that is supported. The only distro that is used in our CI tests and that
is used in the Community managed DockerHub image is
Debian Bookworm.
Visit the official Airflow website documentation (latest stable release) for help with installing Airflow, getting started, or walking through a more complete tutorial.
Note: If you're looking for documentation for the main branch (latest development branch): you can find it on s.apache.org/airflow-docs.
For more information on Airflow Improvement Proposals (AIPs), visit the Airflow Wiki.
Documentation for dependent projects like provider distributions, Docker image, Helm Chart, you'll find it in the documentation index.
We publish Apache Airflow as apache-airflow package in PyPI. Installing it however might be sometimes tricky
because Airflow is a bit of both a library and application. Libraries usually keep their dependencies open, and
applications usually pin them, but we should do neither and both simultaneously. We decided to keep
our dependencies as open as possible (in pyproject.toml) so users can install different versions of libraries
if needed. This means that pip install apache-airflow will not work from time to time or will
produce unusable Airflow installation.
To have repeatable installation, however, we keep a set of "known-to-be-working" constraint
files in the orphan constraints-main and constraints-2-0 branches. We keep those "known-to-be-working"
constraints files separately per major/minor Python version.
You can use them as constraint files when installing Airflow from PyPI. Note that you have to specify
correct Airflow tag/version/branch and Python versions in the URL.
Note: Only
pipanduvinstallation is currently officially supported.
While it is possible to install Airflow with tools like Poetry or
pip-tools, they do not share the same workflow as
pip - especially when it comes to constraint vs. requirements management.
Installing via Poetry or pip-tools is not currently supported.
If you wish to install Airflow using those tools, you should use the constraint files and convert them to the appropriate format and workflow that your tool requires.
pip install 'apache-airflow==3.3.0' \
--constraint "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-3.3.0/constraints-3.1Dag processor kills callbacks for DAGs inside zip files at every bundle refresh
GitDagBundle fails with "Repository not found" right after minting a GitHub App installation token; bare clone retry has no wait
In-place bundle_version refresh leaves old runs showing the wrong commit and breaks triggering at an earlier commit
Improve max_active_runs visibility across logs, API, and UI
"match anywhere" in Dag search UI should be persisted as URL param
dropdown to the Trigger DAG has dramatically decrease UX
Task state store is keyed by positional map_index and survives a clear, so a re-expanded list silently inherits the wrong item's state
KubernetesExecutor feature may be broken in 3.1.0
KubernetesPodOperator task is marked SUCCESS when the task process receives SIGTERM mid-execute (pod deleted by on_kill, cleanup() short-circuits on _killed)
Dag version inflation check runs against zip file instead of individual dags