We (Clover Health) currently deploy airflow to a 12-factor style environment (Aptible) and exclusively use environment variables to define connections. Removal of this feature would require a significant refactor of how we use Airflow and would likely force us away from the mainline code branch.
I would be happy to discuss things further, if you need more details. Certainly we could work around, and certainly there are things we don't like about the current system, but we only have so many places that we can devote resources at any given point in time. --George Leslie-Waksman (Clover Health) On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 9:20 PM siddharth anand <[email protected]> wrote: 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
