Operators
An Operator is conceptually a template for a predefined Task, that you can just define declaratively inside your
DAG:
with DAG("my-dag") as dag:
ping = SimpleHttpOperator(endpoint="http://example.com/update/")
email = EmailOperator(to="admin@example.com", subject="Update complete")
ping >> email
Note
When we talk about a Task, we mean the generic «unit of execution» of a DAG; when we talk about an Operator, we mean a reusable, pre-made Task template whose logic is all done for you and that just needs some arguments.
Core Operators
Airflow has a very extensive set of operators available, with some built-in to the core or pre-installed providers. Some popular operators from core include:
BashOperator- executes a bash commandPythonOperator- calls an arbitrary Python functionEmailOperator- sends an email
For a list of all core operators, see:
Core Operators and Hooks Reference
Provider packages
The capabilities of Apache Airflow can be extended by installing additional packages, called providers.
Providers can contain operators, hooks, sensor, and transfer operators to communicate with a multitude of external systems, but they can also extend Airflow core with new capabilities.
Some popular operators from here include:
SimpleHttpOperatorMySqlOperatorPostgresOperatorMsSqlOperatorOracleOperatorJdbcOperatorDockerOperatorHiveOperatorS3FileTransformOperatorPrestoToMySqlOperatorSlackAPIOperator
The full list of community managed providers is available at:
You can also see index of all community provider's operators and hooks in: