DBT Airflow Factory

Library to convert DBT manifest metadata to Airflow tasks using Astronomer Cosmos

What's New in v1.0.0

Version 1.0.0 replaces custom task builders with Astronomer Cosmos integration. This change maintains 100% backward compatibility - no configuration or code changes are required.

Compatibility:

• Apache Airflow 2.5 - 2.11
• dbt-core 1.7 - 1.10 (peer dependency via Cosmos)
• Python 3.9 - 3.11

Key changes:

• Uses Cosmos DbtTaskGroup for model-level task granularity
• Seeds handled automatically from manifest (no config needed)
• Transparent pass-through of all Kubernetes configuration

See MIGRATION.md for upgrade details.

Documentation

Read the full documentation at https://dbt-airflow-factory.readthedocs.io/

Installation

Use the package manager pip to install the library:

pip install dbt-airflow-factory

Usage

The library is expected to be used inside an Airflow environment with a Kubernetes image referencing dbt.

dbt-airflow-factory's main task is to parse manifest.json and create Airflow DAG out of it. It also reads config files from config directory and therefore is highly customizable (e.g., user can set path to manifest.json).

To start, create a directory with a following structure, where manifest.json is a file generated by dbt:

.
├── config
│   ├── base
│   │   ├── airflow.yml
│   │   ├── dbt.yml
│   │   └── k8s.yml
│   └── dev
│       └── dbt.yml
├── dag.py
└── manifest.json

Then, put the following code into dag.py:

from dbt_airflow_factory.airflow_dag_factory import AirflowDagFactory
from os import path

dag = AirflowDagFactory(path.dirname(path.abspath(__file__)), "dev").create()

When uploaded to Airflow DAGs directory, it will get picked up by Airflow, parse manifest.json and prepare a DAG to run.

Configuration files

It is best to look up the example configuration files in tests directory to get a glimpse of correct configs.

You can use Airflow template variables in your dbt.yml and k8s.yml files, as long as they are inside quotation marks:

target: "{{ var.value.env }}"
some_other_field: "{{ ds_nodash }}"

Analogously, you can use "{{ var.value.VARIABLE_NAME }}" in airflow.yml, but only the Airflow variable getter. Any other Airflow template variables will not work in airflow.yml.

Creation of the directory with data-pipelines-cli

DBT Airflow Factory works best in tandem with data-pipelines-cli tool. dp not only prepares directory for the library to digest, but also automates Docker image building and pushes generated directory to the cloud storage of your choice.

Development

Running Tests

# Install with test dependencies
pip install -e ".[tests]"

# Run tests
pytest tests/

# Run with coverage
pytest tests/ --cov=dbt_airflow_factory --cov-report=term-missing

Known Issue: Installing on Some Systems

If you encounter compilation errors related to google-re2 (an Airflow dependency), use one of these solutions:

Option 1 (Recommended) - Use pre-compiled binaries:

pip install dbt-airflow-factory --only-binary=google-re2

This tells pip to use pre-compiled binary wheels instead of compiling from source.

Option 2 - Install system dependencies:

If binary wheels aren't available for your platform, install the system-level RE2 library:

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt-get install -y libre2-dev

# macOS
brew install re2

# Alpine Linux
apk add --no-cache re2-dev

Then retry: pip install dbt-airflow-factory