Schedule a continually airflow DAG run - airflow

Is there a way to run airflow DAG in a loop?
When trying to create a cycle (connecting the last component to the upstream of the last one) I got "Cycle detected in DAG. Faulty task: ..."
Generally, I have a short flow of 3 BashOperator components which i want to run continually (without any input-output pass from the last component to the first).
Thanks!

You should be able to use the TriggerDagRunOperator to rerun the DAG after the last task is finished. Just put it after the last operator and make it trigger the same DAG.

Related

A DAG is preventing other smaller DAGs tasks to start

I have a big DAG with around 400 tasks that starts at 8:00 and runs for about 2.5 hours.
There are some smaller DAGs that need to start at 9:00, they are scheduled but are not able to start until the first DAG finishes.
I reduced concurrency=6. The DAG is running only 6 parallel tasks, however this is not solving the issue that the other tasks in other DAGs don't start.
There is no other global configuration to limit the number of running tasks, other smaller dags usually run in parallel.
What can be the issue here?
Ariflow version: 2.1 with Local Executor with Postgres backend running on a 20core server.
Tasks of active DAGs not starting
I don't think it's related to concurrency. This could be related to Airflow using the mini-scheduler.
When a task is finished Task supervisor process perform a "mini scheduler" attempting to schedule more tasks of the same DAG. This means that the DAG will be finished quicker as the downstream tasks are set to Scheduled mode directly however one of it's side effect that it can cause starvation for other DAGs in some circumstances. A case like you present where you have one very big DAG that takes very long time to complete and starts before smaller DAGs may be the exact case where stravation can happen.
Try to set schedule_after_task_execution = False in airflow.cfg and it should solve your issue.
Why don't you use the option to invoke the task after the previous one is finished?
In the first DAG, insert the call to the next one as follows:
trigger_new_dag = TriggerDagRunOperator(
task_id=[task name],
trigger_dag_id=[trigered dag],
dag=dag
)
This operator will start a new DAG after the previous one is executed.
Documentation: https://airflow.apache.org/docs/apache-airflow/stable/_api/airflow/operators/trigger_dagrun/index.html

Running DAG in Loop

I want to run Airflow DAG in a continuous loop. Below is the dependency of my DAG:
create_dummy_start >> task1 >> task2 >> task3 >> create_dummy_end >> task_email_notify
The requirement is as soon as the flow reaches the create_dummy_end, the flow should re-iterate back to first task i.e. create_dummy_start.
I have tried re-triggering the DAG using below code:
`create_dummy_end = TriggerDagRunOperator(
task_id='End_Task',
trigger_dag_id=dag.dag_id,
dag=dag
)`
This will re-trigger the DAG but previous instance of DAG also keeps running, and hence it starts multiple instances parallelly which does not suffice the requirement.
I am new to Airflow, any inputs would be helpful.
By definition DAG is "Acyclic" (Directed Acyclic Graph) - there are no cycles.
Airflow - in general - works on "schedule" rather than "continuously" and while you can try to (as you did) trigger a new dag manually, this will always be "another dag run". There is no way to get Airflow in a continuous loop like that within a single DAG run.
You can use other tools for such purpose (which is much closer to streaming rather than Airflow's Batch processing). For example you can use Apache Beam for that - it seems to better fit your needs.

Airflow: how to stop next dag run from starting after failure

I'm trying to see whether or not there is a straightforward way to not start the next dag run if the previous dag run has failures. I already set depends_on_past=True, wait_for_downstream=True, max_active_runs=1.
What i have is tasks 1, 2, 3 where they:
create resources
run job
tear down resources
task 3 always runs with trigger_rule=all_done to make sure we always tear down resources. What i'm seeing is that if task 2 fails, and task 3 then succeeds, the next dag run starts and if i have wait_for_downstream=False it runs task 1 since the previous task 1 was a success and if i have wait_for_downstream=true then it doesn't start the dag as i expect which is perfect.
The problem is that if tasks 1 and 2 succeed but task 3 fails for some reason, now my next dag run starts and task 1 runs immediately because both task 1 and task 2 (due to wait_for_downstream) were successful in the previous run. This is the worst case scenario because task 1 creates resources and then the job is never run so the resources just sit there allocated.
What i ultimately want is for any failure to stop the dag from proceeding to the next dag run. If my previous dag run is marked as fail then the next one should not start at all. Is there any mechanism for doing this?
My current 2 best effort ideas are:
Use a sub dag so that there's only 1 task in the parent dag and therefore the next dag run will never start at all if the previous single task dag failed. This seems like it will work but i've seen mixed reviews on the use of sub dag operators.
Do some sort of logic within the dag as a first task that manually queries the DB to see if the dag has previous failures and fails the task if it does. This seems hacky and not ideal but that it could work as well.
Is there any out of the box solution for this? Seems fairly standard to not want to continue on failure and not want step 1 to start of run 2 if not all steps of run 1 were successful or if run 1 itself was marked as failed.
The reason depends_on_past is not helping your is it's a task parameter not a dag parameter.
Essentially what you're asking for is for the dag to be disabled after a failure.
I can imagine valid use cases for this, and maybe we should add an AirflowDisableDagException that would trigger this.
The problem with this is you risk having your dag disabled and not noticing for days or weeks.
A better solution would be to build recovery or abort logic into your pipeline so that you don't need to disable the dag.
One way you can do this is add a cleanup task to the start of your dag, which can check whether resources were left sitting there and tear them down if appropriate, and just fail the dag run immediately if you get an appropriate error. You can consider using airflow Variable or Xcom to store the state of your resources.
The other option, notwithstanding the risks, is the disable dag approach: if your process fails to tear down resources appropriately, disable the dag. Something along these lines should work:
class MyOp(BaseOperator):
def disable_dag(self):
orm_dag = DagModel(dag_id=self.dag_id)
orm_dag.set_is_paused(is_paused=True)
def execute(self, context):
try:
print('something')
except TeardownFailedError:
self.disable_dag()
The ExternalTaskSensor may work, with an execution_delta of datetime.timedelta(days=1). From the docs:
execution_delta (datetime.timedelta) – time difference with the previous execution to look at, the default is the same execution_date as the current task or DAG. For yesterday, use [positive!] datetime.timedelta(days=1). Either execution_delta or execution_date_fn can be passed to ExternalTaskSensor, but not both.
I've only used it to wait for upstream DAG's to finish, but seems like it should work as self-referencing because the dag_id and task_id are arguments for the sensor. But you'll want to test it first of course.

Is there a way to to setup airflow dags such that dag-a won't run if dag-b is still running and vice versa?

I have multiple dags that run on different cadence: some weekly, some daily etc. I want it to setup such that while dag-a is running, dag-b should wait until it is completed. Also, if dag-b is running dag-a should wait until dag-b completes, etc. Is there a way to do this in airflow out of the box?
What you are looking for is probably the ExternalTaskSensor
Airflow's Cross-DAG Dependencies description is also pretty useful.
If you are using this, there is also the Airflow DAG dependencies plugin, which can be pretty useful for visualizating those dependencies.
You could use the sensor operator to sense the dag runs or a task in a dag run. External task sensor is the best bet. Be careful how you set the timedelta passed. In general, the idea is to specify the when should the sensor be able to find the dag run.
Eg:
If the main dag is scheduled at 4 UTC, and a task sensor is a task in the dag like below
ExternalTaskSensor(
dag=dag,
task_id='dag_sensor_{}'.format(key),
external_dag_id=key,
timedelta=timedelta(days=1),
external_task_id=None,
mode='reschedule',
check_existence=True
)
Then the other dag that should get sensed must be triggering a run at 4.00UTC. That one day difference is set to offset the difference of execution date and current date

Airflow DAG Multiple Runs

I have a DAG that I want to run multiple times after each successful completion. For an example I want to run it 10 times and stop. Is there a way to accomplish this? I tried looking into scheduling with CRON but it doesn't seem clean nor triggering the DAG via UI multiple times doesn't work (runs in parallel).
I found a solution to my use case. It incorporated using depends_on_past=True (mentioned by #Hitesh Gupta) and setting your airflow.cfg file below:
# The maximum number of active DAG runs per DAG
max_active_runs_per_dag = 1
This allowed us to only have one active DAG run at a time and also to not continue the next DAG run if there were failure in the previous run. This is for Airflow version 1.10.1 that I tested on.
You can, in addition to supplying a start_date, provide your DAG an end_date
Quoting the docstring
:param start_date: The timestamp from which the scheduler will attempt
to backfill
:type start_date: datetime.datetime
:param end_date: A date beyond which your DAG won't run, leave to None for open ended scheduling
:type end_date: datetime.datetime
While unrelated, also have a look at following scheduler settings in airflow.cfg as mentioned in this article
run_duration
num_runs
UPDATE-1
In his article Use apache airflow to run task exactly once, #Andreas P has described a clever technique, which I believe can be adapted to your use-case. While even that won't be a very-tidy solution, it would at-least allow you to specify beforehand the number of runs (integer) for DAG instead of end_date.
Alternatively (assuming you implement the above approach) rather than rather than baking this skipping-dag-after max-runs functionality within each DAG, you can create a separate orchestrator DAG that disables a given DAG after its max runs have passed.
You have to set property depends_on_past. This is set under DAG's default arguments section and it refers to previous instance dag instance. This is fix your problem.

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