Development

This section dives into the development process of airflow-dbt-python by describing how you may setup a local development environment and make an effective contribution.

If you would like to dig a bit into the internals of airflow-dbt-python and learn about the development philosophy, it’s recommended that you check out the How does it work? documentation.

Project management: Poetry

airflow-dbt-python uses Poetry for project management. See Poetry’s installation documentation if you need to install it first.

As of airflow-dbt-python version 0.14, we have moved the project to Poetry version >= 1.2.0 to allow us to use dependency groups. Ensure your installation meets this requirement.

Installing airflow-dbt-python

Clone the airflow-dbt-python repository:

git clone https://github.com/tomasfarias/airflow-dbt-python.git
cd airflow-dbt-python

And install it with Poetry:

poetry install --with dev -E airflow-providers -E postgres

The dev dependency group includes development tools for code formatting, type checking, and testing.

The additional extras, airflow-providers, postgres, and airflow install dependencies required for testing. If testing a specific Airflow version, the extras may be ommitted, see the following section with more details.

Installing a different version of Airflow

The airflow extra dependency group installs the latest supported version of Airflow. However, airflow-dbt-python is also tested for older versions of Airflow; as a general rule, besides the latest version of Airflow, we test airflow-dbt-python against the latest version available in AWS MWAA. Although support for older versions of Airflow is not guaranteed, we are open to patches to ensure backwards compatibility as long as they don’t increase maintenance load signifincantly.

If you wish to install a different version of Airflow for testing you may skip the airflow and airflow-providers extras of the previous section and use pip instead to install any versions of apache-airflow and required providers:

pip install apache-airflow==2.2 apache-airflow-providers-amazon==5.0

Modifying dependencies

Apache Airflow is a package of significant size that requires a lot of dependencies. Together with dbt-core, it’s common to find dependency conflicts all over the place. Ultimately, we allow users to figure these issues out themselves, as most of the dependency conflicts are harmless: We do not interact with the dbt CLI, so any conflicts with CLI-specific packages can be safely ignored, but these requirements are not optional for dbt-core.

All being said, this presents a problem when we try to add dependencies or modify existing ones, as poetry will take a long time to check all possible conflicts. Grabbing a constraints file from Airflow and adding it as an optional group in pyproject.toml can be a useful strategy to speed up the process, as we are limiting the search domain for poetry. However, this does require relaxing dependencies one by one in between running poetry lock --no-update.

Pre-commit hooks

A handful of pre-commit hooks are provided, and ensuring their checks pass pass is highly recommended as they are later ran as part of CI checks that will block PRs.

These hooks include:

Trailing whitespace trimming.
Ensure EOF newline.
Detect secrets.
Code formatting (black).
PEP8 linting (flake8).
Static type checking (mypy).
Import sorting (isort).

All pre-commit hooks can be installed with:

pre-commit install

Alternatively, all of the aforementioned tools are installed with the dev dependency group and can ran individually, without pre-commit hooks. For example, to format files with black:

poetry run black airflow_dbt_python/

Testing airflow-dbt-python

Tests are available for all operators, hooks, and utilities. That being said, only a fraction of the large amount of possible inputs that the operators and hooks can take is currently covered, so the unit tests do not offer perfect coverage (a single peek at the DbtBaseOperator should give you an idea of the level of state explosion we manage).

Note

Unit tests (and airflow-dbt-python) assume dbt works correctly and do not assert the behavior of the dbt commands in depth.

Testing specific requirements

Unit tests interact with a PostgreSQL database as a target to run dbt commands. This requires PostgreSQL to be installed in your local environment. Installation instructions for all major platforms can be found here.

An Airflow database needs to be initialized in your local environment. This requires choosing a location for it, via the AIRFLOW_HOME environment variable. The same directory where airflow-dbt-python was cloned to can be used for this:

export AIRFLOW_HOME=$PWD
poetry run airflow db init

The AIRFLOW_HOME environment variable has to be set to the same value used when initializing the database for most testing commands, so it’s recommended to export it.

The files airflow.cfg and airflow.db created as part of initializing the database can be safely deleted once not needed anymore.

Finally, some unit tests require Airflow provider packages. These are all provided by the airflow-providers extra.

Running tests

airflow-dbt-python uses pytest as its testing framework.

All unit tests can be run with:

poetry run pytest tests/ airflow_dbt_python/ -vv

The majority of tests are found in the tests/ directory, but we also test doctest documentation examples.

Measuring test coverage

Generating coverage reports with coverage.py can be done with:

poetry run coverage run -m pytest tests/ airflow_dbt_python/

Unit tests and DAG tests

Most of airflow-dbt-python’s operator and hook tests follow the same pattern:

Initialize a specific operator or hook.
Run it with a basic test dbt project against the test PostgreSQL database.
Assert dbt executes succesfuly, any results are properly propagated, and any artifacts are pushed to where they need to go.

However, airflow-dbt-python also includes DAG tests, which can be seen as broader integration tests. These are located under tests/dags/. DAG tests focus on testing complete end-to-end DAGs, including those shown in example_dags.