Greetings! I want to propose to deprecate Airflow Connection URI representation and remove it in Airflow 3 in favor of the already existing replacement - JSON representation.
In the past URI representation helped to add one of the awesome features - Alternative Secrets Backends: Environment Variables, Files or Provider specific Backends. However I have a feeling that nowadays it have some sort of limitations due to the parser, see: - https://github.com/apache/airflow/issues/33442 Or miss interpretation that Airflow connection it is something more than just representation of Airflow Connection and it is a the replacement to any other type of URIs such as: HTTP, Postgres URIs, SQLAlchemy URI, Spark URI and etc And attempt to fix it - https://github.com/apache/airflow/issues/10913 - https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/27796 - https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/35712 And attempt to use it in DbApiHooks, for detail see: - https://lists.apache.org/thread/8rhmz3qh30hvkondct4sfmgk4vd07mn5 In addition, complicated Connection in the URI format is not human readable, requires additional decoding, and it is hard to create it manually. The only one beneficial part of URI representation is ability to create it programatically https://airflow.apache.org/docs/apache-airflow/stable/howto/connection.html#generating-a-connection-uri , there is no such of method for generate JSON, but I don't see the problem to create such of method in Connection object which return string representation of JSON connection. So my suggestion would be pretty simple: 1. Deprecate accept URI as parameter to the Connection object 2. Deprecate uri property 3. Replace get_uri by get_json 4. Replace all URI examples in Providers Connections by JSON alternatives WDYT? Maybe I miss something and we should keep Airflow Connection as URI in the future Airflow's major versions and support both ways to provide connections as JSON and URI. ---- Best Wishes *Andrey Anshin*
