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

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

If you are just running a local instance you should be able to use environment variables like you expect. Remember that you need to set them in the shell that is running the webserver and scheduler though. If these are in your .profile , you may need to run source ~/.profile .