Installation from PyPI¶

Installation tools
Constraints files
Installation and upgrade scenarios
Troubleshooting
- Airflow command is not recognized
- Symbol not found: _Py_GetArgcArgv

This page describes installations using the apache-airflow package published in PyPI.

Installation tools ¶

Only pip installation is currently officially supported.

While there are some successes with using other 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 constraints and convert them to appropriate format and workflow that your tool requires.

Typical command to install airflow from PyPI looks like below:

pip install "apache-airflow[celery]==2.1.4" --constraint "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-2.1.4/constraints-3.6.txt"

This is an example, see further for more explanation.

Constraints files ¶

Airflow installation 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 at the same time. We decided to keep our dependencies as open as possible (in setup.cfg and setup.py) so users can install different version of libraries if needed. This means that from time to time plain pip install apache-airflow will not work or will produce unusable Airflow installation.

In order to have repeatable installation, we also keep a set of “known-to-be-working” constraint files in the constraints-main, constraints-2-0, constraints-2-1 etc. orphan branches and then we create tag for each released version e.g. constraints-2.1.4. This way, when we keep a tested and working set of dependencies.

Those “known-to-be-working” constraints are 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 version and Python versions in the URL.

You can create the URL to the file substituting the variables in the template below.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-${AIRFLOW_VERSION}/constraints-${PYTHON_VERSION}.txt

where:

AIRFLOW_VERSION - Airflow version (e.g. 2.1.4) or main, 2-0, for latest development version
PYTHON_VERSION Python version e.g. 3.8, 3.7

There is also a no-providers constraint file, which contains just constraints required to install Airflow core. This allows to install and upgrade airflow separately and independently from providers.

You can create the URL to the file substituting the variables in the template below.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-${AIRFLOW_VERSION}/constraints-no-providers-${PYTHON_VERSION}.txt

Installation and upgrade scenarios ¶

In order to simplify the installation, we have prepared examples of how to upgrade Airflow and providers.

Installing Airflow with extras and providers ¶

If you need to install extra dependencies of airflow, you can use the script below to make an installation a one-liner (the example below installs postgres and google provider, as well as async extra.

AIRFLOW_VERSION=2.1.4
PYTHON_VERSION="$(python --version | cut -d " " -f 2 | cut -d "." -f 1-2)"
CONSTRAINT_URL="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-${AIRFLOW_VERSION}/constraints-${PYTHON_VERSION}.txt"
pip install "apache-airflow[async,postgres,google]==${AIRFLOW_VERSION}" --constraint "${CONSTRAINT_URL}"

Note, that it will install the versions of providers that were available at the moment this version of Airflow has been prepared. You need to follow next steps if you want to upgrade provider packages in case they were released afterwards.

Upgrading Airflow with providers ¶

You can upgrade airflow together with extras (providers available at the time of the release of Airflow being installed.

AIRFLOW_VERSION=2.1.4
PYTHON_VERSION="$(python --version | cut -d " " -f 2 | cut -d "." -f 1-2)"
CONSTRAINT_URL="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-${AIRFLOW_VERSION}/constraints-${PYTHON_VERSION}.txt"
pip install --upgrade "apache-airflow[postgres,google]==${AIRFLOW_VERSION}" --constraint "${CONSTRAINT_URL}"

Installation and upgrading of Airflow providers separately ¶

You can manually install all the providers you need. You can continue using the “providers” constraint files but the ‘versioned’ airflow constraints installs only the versions of providers that were available in PyPI at the time of preparing of the airflow version. However, usually you can use “main” version of the providers to install latest version of providers. Usually the providers work with most versions of Airflow, if there will be any incompatibilities, it will be captured as package dependencies.

PYTHON_VERSION="$(python --version | cut -d " " -f 2 | cut -d "." -f 1-2)"
# For example: 3.6
CONSTRAINT_URL="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-main/constraints-${PYTHON_VERSION}.txt"
pip install "apache-airflow-providers-google" --constraint "${CONSTRAINT_URL}"

You can also upgrade the providers to latest versions (you need to use main version of constraints for that):

PYTHON_VERSION="$(python --version | cut -d " " -f 2 | cut -d "." -f 1-2)"
# For example: 3.6
CONSTRAINT_URL="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-main/constraints-${PYTHON_VERSION}.txt"
pip install "apache-airflow-providers-google" --upgrade --constraint "${CONSTRAINT_URL}"

Installation and upgrade of Airflow core ¶

If you don’t want to install any extra providers, initially you can use the command set below.

AIRFLOW_VERSION=2.1.4
PYTHON_VERSION="$(python --version | cut -d " " -f 2 | cut -d "." -f 1-2)"
# For example: 3.6
CONSTRAINT_URL="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-${AIRFLOW_VERSION}/constraints-no-providers-${PYTHON_VERSION}.txt"
# For example: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-2.1.4/constraints-no-providers-3.6.txt
pip install "apache-airflow==${AIRFLOW_VERSION}" --constraint "${CONSTRAINT_URL}"

Troubleshooting ¶

This section describes how to troubleshoot installation issues with PyPI installation.

Airflow command is not recognized ¶

If the airflow command is not getting recognized (can happen on Windows when using WSL), then ensure that ~/.local/bin is in your PATH environment variable, and add it in if necessary:

PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin

You can also start airflow with python -m airflow

Symbol not found: `_Py_GetArgcArgv`¶

If you see Symbol not found: _Py_GetArgcArgv while starting or importing Airflow, this may mean that you are using an incompatible version of Python. For a homebrew installed version of Python, this is generally caused by using Python in /usr/local/opt/bin rather than the Frameworks installation (e.g. for python 3.7: /usr/local/opt/python@3.7/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7).

The crux of the issue is that a library Airflow depends on, setproctitle, uses a non-public Python API which is not available from the standard installation /usr/local/opt/ (which symlinks to a path under /usr/local/Cellar).

An easy fix is just to ensure you use a version of Python that has a dylib of the Python library available. For example:

# Note: these instructions are for python3.7 but can be loosely modified for other versions
brew install python@3.7
virtualenv -p /usr/local/opt/python@3.7/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin/python3 .toy-venv
source .toy-venv/bin/activate
pip install apache-airflow
python
>>> import setproctitle
# Success!

Alternatively, you can download and install Python directly from the Python website.