airflow

Airflow Operations

Use this skill for Apache Airflow operations and troubleshooting. It follows the Astronomer Agents Airflow workflow and supports both MCP and the af CLI.

Setup

Configure the skill in Skill Center:

• AIRFLOW_API_URL: Airflow webserver base URL.
• AIRFLOW_AUTH_TOKEN: preferred token auth.
• AIRFLOW_USERNAME and AIRFLOW_PASSWORD: alternative username/password auth.
• AF_READ_ONLY: defaults to true; keep enabled unless the user explicitly wants write operations.

Authentication requires either AIRFLOW_AUTH_TOKEN or AIRFLOW_USERNAME plus AIRFLOW_PASSWORD.

MCP Server

Saving the Skill configuration automatically creates, updates, and enables the managed airflow MCP entry. The separate Test Connection action starts it only when diagnostics are requested. During normal use, Cowork installs astro-airflow-mcp into the isolated Skill Python environment and starts it on demand with --transport stdio for tool discovery or calls, injecting the configured Airflow environment. No separately managed MCP daemon or system uvx installation is required.

CLI Workflow

Use the run_af script entry for direct af commands:

{
  "skill_name": "airflow",
  "script_name": "run_af",
  "args": ["health"]
}

Common af commands:

Intent	Command
Health check	af health
List DAGs	af dags list
Inspect DAG	af dags explore <dag_id>
List runs	af runs list --dag-id <dag_id>
Diagnose failed run	af runs diagnose <dag_id> <run_id>
Task logs	af tasks logs <dag_id> <run_id> <task_id>
Direct API discovery	af api ls

See api-reference.md for direct REST API examples.

run_af invokes the installed Python CLI entry directly inside the same Skill sandbox, so MCP and CLI calls use the same declared dependencies and environment variables.

Safety Rules

• Default to read-only operations.
• Do not trigger DAGs, pause/unpause DAGs, clear/delete runs, or create/update/delete variables/connections unless the user explicitly confirms the exact target.
• run_af blocks common write operations while AF_READ_ONLY is true.
• Run discovery commands with dry-run first when they can create tokens or persistent config.