Airflow has a simple plugin manager built-in that can integrate external features to its core by simply dropping files in your $AIRFLOW_HOME/plugins folder.

The python modules in the plugins folder get imported, and hooks, operators, sensors, macros, executors and web views get integrated to Airflow’s main collections and become available for use.

What for?

Airflow offers a generic toolbox for working with data. Different organizations have different stacks and different needs. Using Airflow plugins can be a way for companies to customize their Airflow installation to reflect their ecosystem.

Plugins can be used as an easy way to write, share and activate new sets of features.

There’s also a need for a set of more complex applications to interact with different flavors of data and metadata.

Examples:

• A set of tools to parse Hive logs and expose Hive metadata (CPU /IO / phases/ skew /…)

• An anomaly detection framework, allowing people to collect metrics, set thresholds and alerts

• An auditing tool, helping understand who accesses what

• A config-driven SLA monitoring tool, allowing you to set monitored tables and at what time they should land, alert people, and expose visualizations of outages

• …

Why build on top of Airflow?

Airflow has many components that can be reused when building an application:

• A web server you can use to render your views

• A metadata database to store your models

• Access to your databases, and knowledge of how to connect to them

• An array of workers that your application can push workload to

• Airflow is deployed, you can just piggy back on its deployment logistics

• Basic charting capabilities, underlying libraries and abstractions

Interface

To create a plugin you will need to derive the airflow.plugins_manager.AirflowPlugin class and reference the objects you want to plug into Airflow. Here’s what the class you need to derive looks like:

class AirflowPlugin(object):
    # The name of your plugin (str)
    name = None
    # A list of class(es) derived from BaseOperator
    operators = []
    # A list of class(es) derived from BaseSensorOperator
    sensors = []
    # A list of class(es) derived from BaseHook
    hooks = []
    # A list of class(es) derived from BaseExecutor
    executors = []
    # A list of references to inject into the macros namespace
    macros = []
    # A list of objects created from a class derived
    # from flask_admin.BaseView
    admin_views = []
    # A list of Blueprint object created from flask.Blueprint. For use with the flask_admin based GUI
    flask_blueprints = []
    # A list of menu links (flask_admin.base.MenuLink). For use with the flask_admin based GUI
    menu_links = []
    # A list of dictionaries containing FlaskAppBuilder BaseView object and some metadata. See example below
    appbuilder_views = []
    # A list of dictionaries containing FlaskAppBuilder BaseView object and some metadata. See example below
    appbuilder_menu_items = []

    # A list of global operator extra links that can redirect users to
    # external systems. These extra links will be available on the
    # task page in the form of buttons.
    #
    # Note: the global operator extra link can be overridden at each
    # operator level.
    global_operator_extra_links = []

You can derive it by inheritance (please refer to the example below). Please note name inside this class must be specified.

After the plugin is imported into Airflow, you can invoke it using statement like

from airflow.{type, like "operators", "sensors"}.{name specificed inside the plugin class} import *

When you write your own plugins, make sure you understand them well. There are some essential properties for each type of plugin. For example,

• For Operator plugin, an execute method is compulsory.

• For Sensor plugin, a poke method returning a Boolean value is compulsory.

Make sure you restart the webserver and scheduler after making changes to plugins so that they take effect.

Example

The code below defines a plugin that injects a set of dummy object definitions in Airflow.

# This is the class you derive to create a plugin
from airflow.plugins_manager import AirflowPlugin

from flask import Blueprint
from flask_admin import BaseView, expose
from flask_admin.base import MenuLink

# Importing base classes that we need to derive
from airflow.hooks.base_hook import BaseHook
from airflow.models import BaseOperator
from airflow.models.baseoperator import BaseOperatorLink
from airflow.sensors.base_sensor_operator import BaseSensorOperator
from airflow.executors.base_executor import BaseExecutor

# Will show up under airflow.hooks.test_plugin.PluginHook
class PluginHook(BaseHook):
    pass

# Will show up under airflow.operators.test_plugin.PluginOperator
class PluginOperator(BaseOperator):
    pass

# Will show up under airflow.sensors.test_plugin.PluginSensorOperator
class PluginSensorOperator(BaseSensorOperator):
    pass

# Will show up under airflow.executors.test_plugin.PluginExecutor
class PluginExecutor(BaseExecutor):
    pass

# Will show up under airflow.macros.test_plugin.plugin_macro
# and in templates through {{ macros.test_plugin.plugin_macro }}
def plugin_macro():
    pass

# Creating a flask admin BaseView
class TestView(BaseView):
    @expose('/')
    def test(self):
        # in this example, put your test_plugin/test.html template at airflow/plugins/templates/test_plugin/test.html
        return self.render("test_plugin/test.html", content="Hello galaxy!")
v = TestView(category="Test Plugin", name="Test View")

# Creating a flask blueprint to integrate the templates and static folder
bp = Blueprint(
    "test_plugin", __name__,
    template_folder='templates', # registers airflow/plugins/templates as a Jinja template folder
    static_folder='static',
    static_url_path='/static/test_plugin')

ml = MenuLink(
    category='Test Plugin',
    name='Test Menu Link',
    url='https://airflow.apache.org/')

# Creating a flask appbuilder BaseView
class TestAppBuilderBaseView(AppBuilderBaseView):
    @expose("/")
    def test(self):
        return self.render("test_plugin/test.html", content="Hello galaxy!")
v_appbuilder_view = TestAppBuilderBaseView()
v_appbuilder_package = {"name": "Test View",
                        "category": "Test Plugin",
                        "view": v_appbuilder_view}

# Creating a flask appbuilder Menu Item
appbuilder_mitem = {"name": "Google",
                    "category": "Search",
                    "category_icon": "fa-th",
                    "href": "https://www.google.com"}

# A global operator extra link that redirect you to
# task logs stored in S3
class S3LogLink(BaseOperatorLink):
    name = 'S3'

    def get_link(self, operator, dttm):
        return 'https://s3.amazonaws.com/airflow-logs/{dag_id}/{task_id}/{execution_date}'.format(
            dag_id=operator.dag_id,
            task_id=operator.task_id,
            execution_date=dttm,
        )


# Defining the plugin class
class AirflowTestPlugin(AirflowPlugin):
    name = "test_plugin"
    operators = [PluginOperator]
    sensors = [PluginSensorOperator]
    hooks = [PluginHook]
    executors = [PluginExecutor]
    macros = [plugin_macro]
    admin_views = [v]
    flask_blueprints = [bp]
    menu_links = [ml]
    appbuilder_views = [v_appbuilder_package]
    appbuilder_menu_items = [appbuilder_mitem]
    global_operator_extra_links = [S3LogLink(),]

Note on role based views

Airflow 1.10 introduced role based views using FlaskAppBuilder. You can configure which UI is used by setting rbac = True. To support plugin views and links for both versions of the UI and maintain backwards compatibility, the fields appbuilder_views and appbuilder_menu_items were added to the AirflowTestPlugin class.

Plugins as Python packages

It is possible to load plugins via setuptools entrypoint mechanism. To do this link your plugin using an entrypoint in your package. If the package is installed, airflow will automatically load the registered plugins from the entrypoint list.

_Note_: Neither the entrypoint name (eg, my_plugin) nor the name of the plugin class will contribute towards the module and class name of the plugin itself. The structure is determined byairflow.plugins_manager.AirflowPlugin.name and the class name of the plugin component with the pattern airflow.{component}.{name}.{component_class_name}.

# my_package/my_plugin.py
from airflow.plugins_manager import AirflowPlugin
from airflow.models import BaseOperator
from airflow.hooks.base_hook import BaseHook

class MyOperator(BaseOperator):
  pass

class MyHook(BaseHook):
  pass

class MyAirflowPlugin(AirflowPlugin):
  name = 'my_namespace'
  operators = [MyOperator]
  hooks = [MyHook]

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name="my-package",
    ...
    entry_points = {
        'airflow.plugins': [
            'my_plugin = my_package.my_plugin:MyAirflowPlugin'
        ]
    }
)

This will create a hook, and an operator accessible at:

• airflow.hooks.my_namespace.MyHook

• airflow.operators.my_namespace.MyOperator