Dependencies

Airflow extra dependencies

The apache-airflow PyPI basic package only installs what’s needed to get started. Additional packages can be installed depending on what will be useful in your environment. For instance, if you don’t need connectivity with PostgreSQL, you won’t have to go through the trouble of installing the postgres-devel yum package, or whatever equivalent applies on the distribution you are using.

Most of the extra dependencies are linked to a corresponding provider package. For example “amazon” extra has a corresponding apache-airflow-providers-amazon provider package to be installed. When you install Airflow with such extras, the necessary providers are installed automatically (latest versions from PyPI for those packages). However, you can freely upgrade and install providers independently from the main Airflow installation.

For the list of the extras and what they enable, see: Reference for package extras.

Provider distributions

Airflow is delivered in multiple, separate, but connected packages. There is the main apache-airflow package, airflow-core package (which is a dependency of apache-airflow) which implements main airflow functionality, airflow-task-sdk package that is used by Dag authors to implement Dags, and multiple so called Airflow providers packages.

The default Airflow installation doesn’t have many integrations and you have to install them yourself.

You can even develop and install your own providers for Airflow. For more information, see: Providers

For the list of the providers and what they enable, see: Providers packages reference.

Differences between extras and providers

Just to prevent confusion of extras versus providers: Extras and providers are different things, though many extras are leading to installing providers.

Extras are standard Python setuptools feature that allows to add additional set of dependencies as optional features to “core” Apache Airflow. One type of such optional features is providers packages, but not all optional features of Apache Airflow have corresponding providers.

We are using the extras setuptools features to also install providers. Most of the extras are also linked (same name) with providers - for example using apache-airflow[google] extra installs airflow-core and adds apache-airflow-providers-google as dependency. However, there are some extras that do not install providers (examples github_enterprise, kerberos - they add some extra dependencies which are needed for those extra features of Airflow mentioned. The three examples above add respectively GitHub Enterprise OAuth authentication, Kerberos integration . None of those have providers, they are just extending Apache Airflow airflow-core package with new functionalities.

System dependencies

You need certain system level requirements in order to install Airflow. Those are requirements that are known to be needed for Linux Debian distributions:

Debian Bookworm (12)

Debian Bookworm is our platform of choice for development and testing. It is the most up-to-date Debian distribution and it is the one we use for our CI/CD system. It is also the one we recommend for development and testing as well as production use.

sudo apt install -y --no-install-recommends apt-utils ca-certificates \
  curl dumb-init freetds-bin krb5-user libgeos-dev \
  ldap-utils libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules libxmlsec1 locales libffi8 libldap-2.5-0 libssl3 netcat-openbsd \
  lsb-release openssh-client python3-selinux rsync sasl2-bin sqlite3 sudo unixodbc

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