Dags triggered by DagTriggenRunOperator are stuck in queue - airflow

Question

example_trigger_controller_dag.py
import pendulum
from airflow import DAG
from airflow.operators.trigger_dagrun import TriggerDagRunOperator
with DAG(
dag_id="example_trigger_controller_dag",
start_date=pendulum.datetime(2021, 1, 1, tz="UTC"),
catchup=False,
schedule="#once",
tags=["example"],
) as dag:
trigger = TriggerDagRunOperator(
task_id="test_trigger_dagrun",
trigger_dag_id="example_trigger_target_dag", # Ensure this equals the dag_id of the DAG to trigger
conf={"message": "Hello World"},
)
example_trigger_target_dag.py
import pendulum
from airflow import DAG
from airflow.decorators import task
from airflow.operators.bash import BashOperator
#task(task_id="run_this")
def run_this_func(dag_run=None):
"""
Print the payload "message" passed to the DagRun conf attribute.
:param dag_run: The DagRun object
"""
print(f"Remotely received value of {dag_run.conf.get('message')} for key=message")
with DAG(
dag_id="example_trigger_target_dag",
start_date=pendulum.datetime(2021, 1, 1, tz="UTC"),
catchup=False,
schedule=None,
tags=["example"],
) as dag:
run_this = run_this_func()
bash_task = BashOperator(
task_id="bash_task",
bash_command='echo "Here is the message: $message"',
env={"message": '{{ dag_run.conf.get("message") }}'},
)
the task in controller dag successfully ended but the task in target dag stuck in queue. Any ideas about how to solve this problem?

Answer 1

I ran your DAGs (with both of them unpaused) and they work fine in a completely new environment (Airflow 2.5.0, Astro CLI Runtime 7.1.0). So the issue is most likely not with your DAG code.
Tasks stuck in queue is often an issue with the scheduler, mostly with older Airflow versions. I suggest you:
make sure both DAGs are unpaused when the first DAG runs.
make sure all start_dates are in the past (though in this case usually the tasks don't even get queued)
restart your scheduler/Airflow environment
try running the DAGs while no other DAGs are running to check if the issue could be that the parallelism limit is reached. (if you are using K8s executor you should also check worker_pods_creation_batch_size and with the Celery Executor worker_concurrency and stalled_task_timeout)
take a look at your scheduler logs (at $AIRFLOW_HOME/logs/scheduler)
upgrade Airflow if you are running an older version.