Access the Apache Airflow web user interface

Cloud Composer 1 | Cloud Composer 2

Apache Airflow includes a web user interface (UI) that you can use to manage workflows (DAGs), manage the Airflow environment, and perform administrative actions. For example, you can use the web interface to review the progress of a DAG, set up a new data connection, or review logs from previous DAG runs.

Airflow web server

Each Cloud Composer environment has a web server that runs the Airflow web interface. The web server is a part of Cloud Composer environment architecture.

Before you begin

• You must have a role that can view Cloud Composer environments. For more information, see Access control.

• During the environment creation, Cloud Composer configures the URL for the web server that runs the Airflow web interface. The URL is non-customizable.

• Cloud Composer 2 supports the Airflow UI Access Control (Airflow Role-Based Access Control) feature for the Airflow web interface.

Accessing the Airflow web interface

The Airflow web server runs as a workload in your environment's cluster. The web server is deployed to the composer.googleusercontent.com domain and provides access to the Airflow web interface.

Cloud Composer 2 provides access to the interface based on user identities and IAM policy bindings defined for users. Compared to Cloud Composer 1, Cloud Composer 2 uses a different mechanism that does not rely on Identity-Aware Proxy.

Accessing the web interface from the Google Cloud console

To access the Airflow web interface from the Google Cloud console:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Environments page.

   Go to Environments

2. In the Airflow webserver column, follow the Airflow link for your environment.

Limiting access to the Airflow web server

Composer environments let you limit access to the Airflow web server.

You can block all access, or allow access from specific IPv4 or IPv6 external IP ranges.

Currently you cannot configure the allowed IP ranges using private IP addresses.

Retrieving the web interface URL via the gcloud command-line tool

You can access the Airflow web interface from any web browser. To get the URL for the web interface, enter the following gcloud command:

gcloud composer environments describe ENVIRONMENT_NAME \
  --location LOCATION

Replace the following:

• ENVIRONMENT_NAME: the name of your environment.
• LOCATION: the region where the environment is located.

The gcloud command shows the properties of a Cloud Composer environment, including the URLs for the web interface. The URLs are listed as airflowUri and airflowByoidUri:

• The airflowUri URL address is used by Google accounts.
• The airflowByoidUri URL address is used by external identities if you configure Workforce identity federation in your project.

config:
  airflowUri: https://example-dot-us-central1.composer.googleusercontent.com
  airflowByoidUri: https://example-dot-us-central1.composer.byoid.googleusercontent.com

Restarting the web server

Preview — Web server restarting

This feature is covered by the Pre-GA Offerings Terms of the Google Cloud Terms of Service. Pre-GA features might have limited support, and changes to pre-GA features might not be compatible with other pre-GA versions. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.

When debugging or troubleshooting Cloud Composer environments, some issues may be resolved by restarting the Airflow web server. You can restart the web server using the restartWebServer API or the restart-web-server gcloud command:

gcloud beta composer environments restart-web-server ENVIRONMENT_NAME \
  --location=LOCATION