Access Airflow command-line interface

Cloud Composer 3 | Cloud Composer 2 | Cloud Composer 1

Apache Airflow has a command-line interface (CLI) that you can use to perform tasks such as triggering and managing DAGs, getting information about DAG runs and tasks, adding and deleting connections and users.

Supported Airflow CLI commands

Airflow uses Airflow CLI syntax, which is described in the Airflow documentation.

Cloud Composer 3 supports the following Airflow CLI commands:

  • (Airflow 2 and 3) The gcloud composer environments run command runs Airflow CLI commands for your environment. Some commands are blocked and it's not possible to run them. See the command's reference for the list of supported Airflow CLI commands.

  • (Airflow 3) The airflowctl command-line tool supports a subset of Airflow CLI commands and runs them using Airflow REST API. All commands available in airflowctl are supported in Cloud Composer. Make sure that the user's Airflow account has an Airflow role that can run a specific command.

Before you begin

For executing Airflow CLI commands through Google Cloud CLI:

  • Your Google Account must have permissions to use Google Cloud CLI with Cloud Composer and run Airflow CLI commands.

  • Airflow CLI commands executed through Google Cloud CLI consume the environments.executeAirflowCommand quota.

For executing Airflow CLI commands through the airflowctl command-line tool (in Airflow 3):

Run Airflow CLI commands with gcloud CLI

To run Airflow CLI commands in your environments, use gcloud CLI:

gcloud composer environments run ENVIRONMENT_NAME \
    --location LOCATION \
    SUBCOMMAND \
    -- SUBCOMMAND_ARGUMENTS

Replace the following:

  • ENVIRONMENT_NAME: the name of your environment.
  • LOCATION: the region where the environment is located.
  • SUBCOMMAND: one of the supported Airflow CLI commands.
  • SUBCOMMAND_ARGUMENTS with arguments for the Airflow CLI command.

Sub-command arguments separator

Separate the arguments for the specified Airflow CLI command with --:

  • Specify compound CLI commands as a sub-command.
  • Specify any arguments for compound commands as sub-command arguments, after a -- separator.

Example:

gcloud composer environments run example-environment \
    dags list -- --output=json

Default location

Most gcloud composer commands require a location. You can specify the location with the --location flag, or by setting the default location.

For example, to trigger a DAG named sample_quickstart with the ID 5077 in your Cloud Composer environment:

gcloud composer environments run example-environment \
    --location us-central1 dags trigger -- sample_quickstart \
    --run-id=5077

Run Airflow CLI commands with airflowctl

The airflowctl command-line tool is a command-line utility provided by Airflow for running Airflow CLI commands. It supports a subset of Airflow CLI commands and runs them using Airflow REST API. All commands available in airflowctl are supported in Cloud Composer.

Authorization and authentication with airflowctl in Cloud Composer works in the following way:

  • Because airflowctl uses the Airflow REST API, make sure that the Airflow user account associated with your Google Account or service account has an Airflow role with enough permissions to run a command. For example, some commands can be executed only by Airflow users that have the Admin role.

  • The API token used by airflowctl is provided with the gcloud auth command. By default, the token has an expiration period of 1 hour. You can change it with the --lifetime argument provided to this command.

To authenticate with airflowctl, run the following command:

airflowctl auth login \
  --api-url WEB_SERVER_URL \
  --api-token $(gcloud auth print-access-token)

Replace the following:

Example:

airflowctl auth login \
  --api-url https://example-dot-us-central1.composer.googleusercontent.com \
  --api-token $(gcloud auth print-access-token)

After you authenticate with airflowctl, you can run Airflow CLI commands:

airflowctl dags list

Run Airflow CLI commands through Cloud Composer API

In Cloud Composer 3, you can run Airflow CLI commands through Cloud Composer API.

Execute a command

Construct an environments.executeAirflowCommand API request:

{
  "environment": "projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/LOCATION/environments/ENVIRONMENT_NAME",
  "command": "AIRFLOW_COMMAND",
  "subcommand": "AIRFLOW_SUBCOMMAND",
  "parameters": [
    "SUBCOMMAND_PARAMETER"
  ]
}

Replace the following:

  • PROJECT_ID: the Project ID.
  • LOCATION: the region where the environment is located.
  • ENVIRONMENT_NAME: the name of your environment.
  • AIRFLOW_COMMAND: Airflow CLI command that you want to execute, such as dags.
  • AIRFLOW_SUBCOMMAND: Sub-command for the Airflow CLI command that you want to execute, such as list.
  • (optional) SUBCOMMAND_PARAMETER: Parameters for the sub-command. If you want to use more than one parameter, add more items to the list.

Example:

// POST https://composer.googleapis.com/v1/{environment=projects/*/locations/*/environments/*}:executeAirflowCommand
{
  "environment": "projects/example-project/locations/us-central1/environments/example-environment",
  "command": "dags",
  "subcommand": "list",
  "parameters": [
    "-o json",
    "--verbose"
  ]
}

Poll command status

After you execute an Airflow CLI command through Cloud Composer API, check if the command was successfully completed by making a PollAirflowCommand request and inspecting the fields in exitInfo for errors and status codes. The output field contains log lines.

To get the command execution status and fetch logs, provide executionId, pod, and podNamespace values returned by ExecuteAirflowCommandRequest:

Example:

// POST https://composer.googleapis.com/v1/{environment=projects/*/locations/*/environments/*}:pollAirflowCommand
{
  "executionId": "a117da94-355d-4ad4-839e-ac39ccb0bf48",
  "pod": "airflow-webserver-66d96b858f-tn96b",
  "podNamespace": "airflow-2-10-2-build-13-226523e4",
  "nextLineNumber": 1
}

What's next