How do I set an environment variable for airflow to use?

Question

Airflow is returning an error when trying to run a DAG saying that it can't find an environment variable, which is odd because it's able to find 3 other environment variables that I'm storing as a Python variable. No issues with those variables at all.

I have all 4 variables in ~/.profile and have also done

export var1="varirable1"
export var2="varirable2"
export var3="varirable3"
export var4="varirable4"

Under what user does airflow run? I've done those export commands under sudo as well, so I thought they would be picked up by airflow when it runs the dag

Solution 1

Is it maybe because airflow uses non-login shell? Have you tried putting these lines in : ~/.bashrc instead of ~/.profile ?

Solution 2

As per this answer, the variables should be put in /etc/default/airflow (on Debian/Ubuntu) or /etc/sysconfig/airflow (on Centos/Redhat).