Installing Apache Airflow, Creating Users, and Using Basic Commands

Installation of Apache Airflow is best performed inside a Python virtual environment that requires the latest Python and pip.

First, create a virtual environment with virtualenv apache_airflow , activate it via cd apache_airflow/bin and source activate , then set the Airflow home directory with export AIRFLOW_HOME=~/airflow . Install Airflow using pip install apache-airflow , initialize its metadata database with airflow db init , and start the web server on port 8081 using airflow webserver -p 8081 . Verify the installation by opening http://localhost:8081/ .

To access the Airflow UI, create an admin user via the CLI: airflow users create -e [email protected] -f John -l Doe -p admin -r Admin -u admin . After logging in, you may see a warning that the scheduler is not running; start it with airflow scheduler and refresh the page.

Airflow provides built‑in roles—Admin, User, Op, Viewer, and Public—each with specific permissions. Admins can manage all permissions, while other roles have progressively limited access.

Common Airflow commands include airflow dags list to list DAGs, airflow tasks list <dag_id> to view tasks, and airflow dags trigger -e <date> <dag_id> to trigger a DAG execution.

The article concludes that these steps allow you to install Airflow locally, create an initial admin user, understand role‑based access control, and operate basic Airflow commands.