Provider packages

Apache Airflow 2 is built in modular way. The “Core” of Apache Airflow provides core scheduler functionality which allow you to write some basic tasks, but the capabilities of Apache Airflow can be extended by installing additional packages, called providers.

Providers can contain operators, hooks, sensor, and transfer operators to communicate with a multitude of external systems, but they can also extend Airflow core with new capabilities.

You can install those provider packages separately in order to interface with a given service. The providers for Apache Airflow are designed in the way that you can write your own providers easily. The Apache Airflow Community develops and maintain more than 60 provider packages, but you are free to develop your own providers - the providers you build have exactly the same capability as the providers written by the community, so you can release and share those providers with others.

The full list of community managed providers is available at Providers Index.

You can also see index of all community provider’s operators and hooks in Operators and Hooks Reference

Extending Airflow core functionality

Providers give you the capability of extending core Airflow with extra capabilities. The Core airflow provides basic and solid functionality of scheduling, the providers extend its capabilities. Here we describe all the custom capabilities.

Airflow automatically discovers which providers add those additional capabilities and, once you install provider package and re-start Airflow, those become automatically available to Airflow Users.

The summary of the core functionalities that can be extended are available in Core Extensions.

Auth backends

The providers can add custom authentication backends, that allow you to configure the way how your web server authenticates your users, integrating it with public or private authentication services.

You can see all the authentication backends available via community-managed providers in Auth backends

Custom connections

The providers can add custom connection types, extending connection form and handling custom form field behaviour for the connections defined by the provider.

You can see all custom connections available via community-managed providers in Connections.

Logging

The providers can add additional task logging capabilities. By default Apache Airflow saves logs for tasks locally and make them available to Airflow UI via internal http server. However, providers can add extra logging capabilities, where Airflow Logs can be written to a remote service and retrieved from those services.

You can see all task loggers available via community-managed providers in Writing logs.

Secret backends

Airflow has the capability of reading connections, variables and configuration from Secret Backends rather than from its own Database.

You can see all secret backends available via community-managed providers in Secret backends.

Notifications

The providers can add custom notifications, that allow you to configure the way how you would like to receive notifications about the status of your tasks/DAGs.

You can see all the notifications available via community-managed providers in Notifications.

Installing and upgrading providers

Separate provider packages give the possibilities that were not available in 1.10:

  1. You can upgrade to latest version of particular providers without the need of Apache Airflow core upgrade.

  2. You can downgrade to previous version of particular provider in case the new version introduces some problems, without impacting the main Apache Airflow core package.

  3. You can release and upgrade/downgrade provider packages incrementally, independent from each other. This means that you can incrementally validate each of the provider package update in your environment, following the usual tests you have in your environment.

Types of providers

Providers have the same capacity - no matter if they are provided by the community or if they are third-party providers. This chapter explains how community managed providers are versioned and released and how you can create your own providers.

Community maintained providers

From the point of view of the community, Airflow is delivered in multiple, separate packages. The core of Airflow scheduling system is delivered as apache-airflow package and there are more than 60 provider packages which can be installed separately as so called Airflow Provider packages. Those packages are available as apache-airflow-providers packages - for example there is an apache-airflow-providers-amazon or apache-airflow-providers-google package).

Community maintained providers are released and versioned separately from the Airflow releases. We are following the Semver versioning scheme for the packages. Some versions of the provider packages might depend on particular versions of Airflow, but the general approach we have is that unless there is a good reason, new version of providers should work with recent versions of Airflow 2.x. Details will vary per-provider and if there is a limitation for particular version of particular provider, constraining the Airflow version used, it will be included as limitation of dependencies in the provider package.

Each community provider has corresponding extra which can be used when installing airflow to install the provider together with Apache Airflow - for example you can install airflow with those extras: apache-airflow[google,amazon] (with correct constraints -see Installation) and you will install the appropriate versions of the apache-airflow-providers-amazon and apache-airflow-providers-google packages together with Apache Airflow.

Some of the community providers have cross-provider dependencies as well. Those are not required dependencies, they might simply enable certain features (for example transfer operators often create dependency between different providers. Again, the general approach here is that the providers are backwards compatible, including cross-dependencies. Any kind of breaking changes and requirements on particular versions of other provider packages are automatically documented in the release notes of every provider.

Note

For Airflow 1.10 We also provided apache-airflow-backport-providers packages that could be installed with those versions Those were the same providers as for 2.0 but automatically back-ported to work for Airflow 1.10. The last release of backport providers was done on March 17, 2021 and the backport providers will no longer be released, since Airflow 1.10 has reached End-Of-Life as of June 17, 2021.

If you want to contribute to Apache Airflow, you can see how to build and extend community managed providers in Community Providers.

Custom provider packages

You can develop and release your own providers. Your custom operators, hooks, sensors, transfer operators can be packaged together in a standard airflow package and installed using the same mechanisms. Moreover they can also use the same mechanisms to extend the Airflow Core with auth backends, custom connections, logging, secret backends and extra operator links as described in the previous chapter.

How to create your own provider

As mentioned in the Providers documentation, custom providers can extend Airflow core - they can add extra links to operators as well as custom connections. You can use build your own providers and install them as packages if you would like to use the mechanism for your own, custom providers.

Adding a provider to Airflow is just a matter of building a Python package and adding the right meta-data to the package. We are using standard mechanism of python to define entry points . Your package needs to define appropriate entry-point apache_airflow_provider which has to point to a callable implemented by your package and return a dictionary containing the list of discoverable capabilities of your package. The dictionary has to follow the json-schema specification.

Most of the schema provides extension point for the documentation (which you might want to also use for your own purpose) but the important fields from the extensibility point of view are those:

Displaying package information in CLI/API:

  • package-name - Name of the package for the provider.

  • name - Human-friendly name of the provider.

  • description - Additional description of the provider.

  • version - List of versions of the package (in reverse-chronological order). The first version in the list is the current package version. It is taken from the version of package installed, not from the provider_info information.

Exposing customized functionality to the Airflow’s core:

  • extra-links - this field should contain the list of all operator class names that are adding extra links capability. See Define an operator extra link for description of how to add extra link capability to the operators of yours.

  • connection-types - this field should contain the list of all connection types together with hook class names implementing those custom connection types (providing custom extra fields and custom field behaviour). This field is available as of Airflow 2.2.0 and it replaces deprecated hook-class-names. See Managing Connections for more details

  • hook-class-names (deprecated) - this field should contain the list of all hook class names that provide custom connection types with custom extra fields and field behaviour. The hook-class-names array is deprecated as of Airflow 2.2.0 (for optimization reasons) and will be removed in Airflow 3. If your providers are targeting Airflow 2.2.0+ you do not have to include the hook-class-names array, if you want to also target earlier versions of Airflow 2, you should include both hook-class-names and connection-types arrays. See Managing Connections for more details.

When your providers are installed you can query the installed providers and their capabilities with the airflow providers command. This way you can verify if your providers are properly recognized and whether they define the extensions properly. See Command Line Interface and Environment Variables Reference for details of available CLI sub-commands.

When you write your own provider, consider following the Naming conventions for provider packages

FAQ for Airflow and Providers

Upgrading Airflow 2.0 and Providers

When upgrading to a new Airflow version such as 2.0, but possibly 2.0.1 and beyond, is the best practice to also upgrade provider packages at the same time?

It depends on your use case. If you have automated or semi-automated verification of your installation, that you can run a new version of Airflow including all provider packages, then definitely go for it. If you rely more on manual testing, it is advised that you upgrade in stages. Depending on your choice you can either upgrade all used provider packages first, and then upgrade Airflow Core or the other way round. The first approach - when you first upgrade all providers is probably safer, as you can do it incrementally, step-by-step replacing provider by provider in your environment.

Customizing Provider Packages

I have an older version of my provider package which we have lightly customized and is working fine with my MSSQL installation. I am upgrading my Airflow version. Do I need to upgrade my provider, or can I keep it as it is?

It depends on the scope of customization. There is no need to upgrade the provider packages to later versions unless you want to upgrade to Airflow version that introduces backwards-incompatible changes. Generally speaking, with Airflow 2 we are following the Semver approach where we will introduce backwards-incompatible changes in Major releases, so all your modifications (as long as you have not used internal Airflow classes) should work for All Airflow 2.* versions.

Creating your own providers

When I write my own provider, do I need to do anything special to make it available to others?

You do not need to do anything special besides creating the apache_airflow_provider entry point returning properly formatted meta-data - dictionary with extra-links and connection-types fields (and deprecated hook-class-names field if you are also targeting versions of Airflow before 2.2.0).

Anyone who runs airflow in an environment that has your Python package installed will be able to use the package as a provider package.

What do I need to do to turn a package into a provider?

You need to do the following to turn an existing Python package into a provider (see below for examples):

  • Add the apache_airflow_provider entry point in the setup.cfg - this tells airflow where to get the required provider metadata

  • Create the function that you refer to in the first step as part of your package: this functions returns a dictionary that contains all meta-data about your provider package

  • If you want Airflow to link to documentation of your Provider in the providers page, make sure to add “project-url/documentation” metadata to your package. This will also add link to your documentation in PyPI.

  • note that the dictionary should be compliant with airflow/provider_info.schema.json JSON-schema specification. The community-managed providers have more fields there that are used to build documentation, but the requirement for runtime information only contains several fields which are defined in the schema:

airflow/provider_info.schema.json

{
  "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-07/schema#",
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "package-name": {
      "description": "Package name available under which the package is available in the PyPI repository.",
      "type": "string"
    },
    "name": {
      "description": "Provider name",
      "type": "string"
    },
    "description": {
      "description": "Information about the package in RST format",
      "type": "string"
    },
    "hook-class-names": {
      "type": "array",
      "description": "Hook class names that provide connection types to core (deprecated by connection-types)",
      "items": {
        "type": "string"
      },
      "deprecated": {
        "description": "The hook-class-names property has been deprecated in favour of connection-types which is more performant version allowing to only import individual Hooks rather than all hooks at once",
        "deprecatedVersion": "2.2.0"
      }
    },
    "connection-types": {
      "type": "array",
      "description": "Map of connection types mapped to hook class names.",
      "items": {
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {
          "connection-type": {
            "description": "Type of connection defined by the provider",
            "type": "string"
          },
          "hook-class-name": {
            "description": "Hook class name that implements the connection type",
            "type": "string"
          }
        }
      },
      "required": ["connection-type", "hook-class-name"]
    },
    "extra-links": {
      "type": "array",
      "description": "Operator class names that provide extra link functionality",
      "items": {
        "type": "string"
      }
    },
    "secrets-backends": {
      "type": "array",
      "description": "Secrets Backend class names",
      "items": {
        "type": "string"
      }
    },
    "logging": {
      "type": "array",
      "description": "Logging Task Handlers class names",
      "items": {
          "type": "string"
      }
    },
    "auth-backends": {
      "type": "array",
      "description": "API Auth Backend module names",
      "items": {
          "type": "string"
      }
    },
      "notifications": {
          "type": "array",
          "description": "Notification class names",
          "items": {
              "type": "string"
          }
      },
    "task-decorators": {
        "type": "array",
        "description": "Apply custom decorators to the TaskFlow API. Can be accessed by users via '@task.<name>'",
        "items": {
            "name": {
                "type": "string"
            },
            "path": {
                "type": "string"
            }
        }
    }
  },
  "required": [
    "name",
    "description"
  ]
}

Example setup.cfg:

[options.entry_points]
# the function get_provider_info is defined in myproviderpackage.somemodule
apache_airflow_provider=
  provider_info=myproviderpackage.somemodule:get_provider_info

Example myproviderpackage/somemodule.py:

def get_provider_info():
    return {
        "package-name": "my-package-name",
        "name": "name",
        "description": "a description",
        "hook-class-names": [
            "myproviderpackage.hooks.source.SourceHook",
        ],
    }

How do provider packages work under the hood?

When running Airflow with your provider package, there will be (at least) three components to your airflow installation:

  • The installation itself (for example, a venv where you installed airflow with pip install apache-airflow) together with the related files (e.g. dags folder)

  • The apache-airflow package

  • Your own myproviderpackage package that is independent of apache-airflow or your airflow installation, which can be a local Python package (that you install via pip install -e /path/to/my-package), a normal pip package (pip install myproviderpackage), or any other type of Python package

In the myproviderpackage package you need to add the entry point and provide the appropriate metadata as described above. If you have done that, airflow does the following at runtime:

  • Loop through ALL packages installed in your environment / venv

  • For each package, if the package’s setup.cfg has a section [options.entry_points], and if that section has a value for apache_airflow_provider, then get the value for provider_info, e.g. myproviderpackage.somemodule:get_provider_info

  • That value works like an import statement: myproviderpackage.somemodule:get_provider_info translates to something like from myproviderpackage.somemodule import get_provider_info, and the get_provider_info that is being imported should be a callable, i.e. a function

  • This function should return a dictionary with metadata

  • If you have custom connection types as part of your package, that metadata will including a field called hook-class-names which should be a list of strings of your custom hooks - those strings should also be in an import-like format, e.g. myproviderpackage.hooks.source.SourceHook means that there is a class SourceHook in myproviderpackage/hooks/source.py - airflow then imports these hooks and looks for the functions get_ui_field_behaviour and get_connection_form_widgets (both optional) as well as the attributes conn_type and hook_name to create the custom connection type in the airflow UI

Should I name my provider specifically or should it be created in ``airflow.providers`` package?

We have quite a number (>60) of providers managed by the community and we are going to maintain them together with Apache Airflow. All those providers have well-defined structured and follow the naming conventions we defined and they are all in airflow.providers package. If your intention is to contribute your provider, then you should follow those conventions and make a PR to Apache Airflow to contribute to it. But you are free to use any package name as long as there are no conflicts with other names, so preferably choose package that is in your “domain”.

Is there a convention for a connection id and type?

Very good question. Glad that you asked. We usually follow the convention <NAME>_default for connection id and just <NAME> for connection type. Few examples:

  • google_cloud_default id and google_cloud_platform type

  • aws_default id and aws type

You should follow this convention. It is important, to use unique names for connection type, so it should be unique for your provider. If two providers try to add connection with the same type only one of them will succeed.

Can I contribute my own provider to Apache Airflow?

Of course, but it’s better to check at developer’s mailing list whether such contribution will be accepted by the Community, before investing time to make the provider compliant with community requirements. The Community only accepts providers that are generic enough, are well documented, fully covered by tests and with capabilities of being tested by people in the community. So we might not always be in the position to accept such contributions.

After you think that your provider matches the expected values above, you can read Community Providers to check all prerequisites for a new community Provider and discuss it at the Devlist.

However, in case you have your own, specific provider, which you can maintain on your own or by your team, you are free to publish the providers in whatever form you find appropriate. The custom and community-managed providers have exactly the same capabilities.

Can I advertise my own provider to Apache Airflow users and share it with others as package in PyPI?

Absolutely! We have an Ecosystem area on our website where we share non-community managed extensions and work for Airflow. Feel free to make a PR to the page and add we will evaluate and merge it when we see that such provider can be useful for the community of Airflow users.

Can I charge for the use of my provider?

This is something that is outside of our control and domain. As an Apache project, we are commercial-friendly and there are many businesses built around Apache Airflow and many other Apache projects. As a community, we provide all the software for free and this will never change. What 3rd-party developers are doing is not under control of Apache Airflow community.

Using Backport Providers in Airflow 1.10

I have an Airflow version (1.10.12) running and it is stable. However, because of a Cloud provider change, I would like to upgrade the provider package. If I don’t need to upgrade the Airflow version anymore, how do I know that this provider version is compatible with my Airflow version?

We have Backport Providers are compatible with 1.10 but they stopped being released on March 17, 2021. Since then, no new changes to providers for Airflow 2.0 are going to be released as backport packages. It’s the highest time to upgrade to Airflow 2.0.

When it comes to compatibility of providers with different Airflow 2 versions, each provider package will keep its own dependencies, and while we expect those providers to be generally backwards-compatible, particular versions of particular providers might introduce dependencies on specific Airflow versions.

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