I'm trying to understand the impetus for a feature - the ability to define
connections using OS environment vars.

https://airflow.incubator.apache.org/concepts.html#connections

It seems folks use this so that they can set up Airflow connections using
automation (e.g. Ansible, chef, puppet. etc...).

I've never used this feature and would prefer to have CLI commands set up
connections (e.g. https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow/pull/1802).

It does not seem to me that these connections are revealed in the
connection list view page or imported into the db table. It seems like the
OS environment serves as a parallel repository for connection information,
side-by-side the airflow metadata db. I don't like this this "parallel"
repository as it is one more source of metadata to keep track of.

If anyone is using the connections being set via env_var for any purpose
aside from what I've listed here, please make it known. Else, I would like
to add this feature to the list of 2.0 deprecated features.

In the meantime, I will spend some time to review and push the CLI
connection PR forward. We currently already support setting Variables and
Pools via the CLI. It makes sense to manage Connections in the same way.
The CLI can be called via automation toolsets like those listed above.

-s

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