Running Airflow with systemd¶

Airflow can integrate with systemd based systems. This makes watching your daemons easy as systemd can take care of restarting a daemon on failures.

In the scripts/systemd directory, you can find unit files that have been tested on Redhat based systems. These files can be used as-is by copying them over to /usr/lib/systemd/system.

You can find the latest systemd unit files on GitHub: https://github.com/apache/airflow/tree/main/scripts/systemd

Assumptions¶

The following assumptions have been made while creating these unit files:

Airflow runs as the following user:group airflow:airflow.
Airflow runs on a Redhat based system.

If this is not the case, appropriate changes will need to be made.

Environment Configuration¶

Please note that environment configuration is picked up from /etc/sysconfig/airflow.

An example file is supplied within scripts/systemd. You can also define configuration at AIRFLOW_HOME or AIRFLOW_CONFIG.

Using Virtual Environments¶

Note

If Airflow is installed inside a virtual environment (e.g. venv or conda), you must update the ExecStart line in each systemd unit file to activate the virtualenv first.

Example:

ExecStart=/bin/bash -c 'source /home/airflow/airflow_venv/bin/activate && airflow scheduler'

Replace /home/airflow/airflow_venv/ with the path to your virtual environment.

New Airflow 3.0 Services¶

Since Apache Airflow 3.0, additional components have been split out into separate services. The following new unit files are available:

airflow-triggerer.service for deferrable task triggering
airflow-api.service for the standalone REST API server