Simplify QuickStart for Airflow 3 standalone mode

[franzwong]

I have spent a few hours trying to set up Airflow and install a simple DAG. The DAG page focuses too much on explaining what a DAG is, rather than on how to create one.

As a beginner, I have these questions when I set it up.

• I didn't know new DAG is detected every 5 minutes.
• The DAG page asks to run airflow db migrate, shouldn't it be run after Airflow is started? Is it required to do that every new DAG is added?
• Where can I find the user name and password to login.

Anyway, I have summarized the steps how to set up Airflow and install DAG. Here is my note.

Setup

Install Airflow

export AIRFLOW_HOME=$(pwd)/airflow
mkdir -p ${AIRFLOW_HOME}
mkdir -p ${AIRFLOW_HOME}/dags

cat << EOF > requirements.txt
--constraint https://raw.githubusercontent.com/apache/airflow/constraints-3.2.0/constraints-3.13.txt
apache-airflow==3.2.0
graphviz==0.21
EOF

echo "3.13" > .python-version

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Initialize Airflow

airflow db migrate

Disable loading examples

(You don't really need this step. But there are too many examples and they might be distracting.)

sed -i 's/load_examples = True/load_examples = False/g' ${AIRFLOW_HOME}/airflow.cfg

Start Airflow

airflow standalone

Add DAG

Create a file my_example_dag.py in ${AIRFLOW_HOME}/dags with following content.

from airflow.sdk import DAG
from airflow.providers.standard.operators.python import PythonOperator

from datetime import datetime


def greeting():
    print("Hello world!")

with DAG(
    "my_example_dag",
    start_date=datetime(2000, 1, 1),
    schedule="*/1 * * * *",
    catchup=False
) as dag:
    task = PythonOperator(
        task_id="greet_task",
        python_callable=greeting
    )

Check whether dag is loaded

(By default, Airflow looks for new DAG every 5 minutes.)

airflow dags list

Enable DAG

airflow dags unpaused my_example_dag

Check DAG status

Login to web console (htttp://localhost:8080). Default user name and password are stored in ${AIRFLOW_HOME}/simple_auth_manager_passwords.json.generated.

Clean up

rm -rf airflow

[saidiraja]

Hi, I recently went through the same setup process with Airflow 3.x and had similar confusion, especially regarding authentication and initialization.

A few clarifications that might help:

1. Username and Password
   In Airflow 3.x, credentials are no longer "admin/admin".
   When you run:

airflow standalone

Airflow automatically generates the admin password and stores it in:

${AIRFLOW_HOME}/simple_auth_manager_passwords.json.generated

You can retrieve it using:

cat ~/airflow/simple_auth_manager_passwords.json.generated

2. Database initialization
   The command:

airflow db migrate

should be run before starting Airflow, but it is also automatically handled when using airflow standalone, so you usually don’t need to run it manually.

3. DAG detection
   Yes, Airflow scans for new DAGs periodically (by default every ~5 minutes), so newly added DAGs may not appear immediately.

4. General feedback
   I agree that the current documentation focuses more on concepts rather than a clear step-by-step beginner setup. A simplified quick-start guide could really improve the onboarding experience.

Thanks for sharing your notes — they are very helpful for beginners!

[potiuk]

Would be even better if one of you updates the quick-quide with those things while you still remember what you stumbled upon.

[saidiraja]

Thanks for the suggestion!

I actually opened a Pull Request to improve the Quick Start documentation, specifically to clarify the authentication behavior when using airflow standalone in Airflow 3.x (where the password is generated and not always shown in the terminal).

I based it directly on the confusion I encountered during setup, so hopefully it helps future beginners.

Let me know if anything should be improved or adjusted!