Operators¶

Documentation

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 command
PythonOperator - calls an arbitrary Python function
EmailOperator - 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.

Provider packages

Some popular operators from here include:

SimpleHttpOperator
MySqlOperator
PostgresOperator
MsSqlOperator
OracleOperator
JdbcOperator
DockerOperator
HiveOperator
S3FileTransformOperator
PrestoToMySqlOperator
SlackAPIOperator

The full list of community managed providers is available at:

Providers Index

You can also see index of all community provider's operators and hooks in:

Operators and Hooks Reference