Adding Connections, Variables and Environment Variables¶

You can programmatically add Connections, Variables and arbitrary Environment Variables to your Airflow deployment using the Helm chart.

Connections and Sensitive Environment Variables¶

Under the secret and extraSecret sections of the values.yaml you can pass connection strings and sensitive environment variables into Airflow using the Helm chart. To illustrate, lets create a yaml file called override.yaml to override values under these sections of the values.yaml file.

# override.yaml

secret:
  - envName: "AIRFLOW_CONN_GCP"
    secretName: "my-airflow-connections"
    secretKey: "AIRFLOW_CONN_GCP"
  - envName: "my-env"
    secretName: "my-secret-name"
    secretKey: "my-secret-key"

extraSecrets:
  my-airflow-connections:
    data: |
      AIRFLOW_CONN_GCP: 'base64_encoded_gcp_conn_string'
  my-secret-name:
    stringData: |
      my-secret-key: my-secret

Variables¶

Airflow supports Variables which enable users to craft dynamic DAGs. You can set Variables in Airflow in three ways - UI, command line, and within your DAG file. See Managing Variables for more.

With the Helm chart, you can also inject environment variables into Airflow. So in the example override.yaml file, we can override values of interest in the env section of the values.yaml file.

env:
  - name: "AIRFLOW_VAR_KEY"
    value: "value_1"
  - name: "AIRFLOW_VAR_ANOTHER_KEY"
    value: "value_2"

You can also utilize extraEnv and extraEnvFrom if you need the name or value to be templated.

extraEnv: |
  - name: AIRFLOW_VAR_HELM_RELEASE_NAME
    value: '{{ .Release.Name }}'

extraEnvFrom: |
  - configMapRef:
      name: '{{ .Release.Name }}-airflow-variables'

extraConfigMaps:
  '{{ .Release.Name }}-airflow-variables':
    data: |
      AIRFLOW_VAR_HELLO_MESSAGE: "Hi!"