Prerequisites¶

Airflow® is tested with:

Python: 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12
Databases:
- PostgreSQL: 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
- MySQL: 8.0, Innovation
- SQLite: 3.15.0+
Kubernetes: 1.26, 1.27, 1.28, 1.29, 1.30

While we recommend a minimum of 4GB of memory for Airflow, the actual requirements heavily depend on your chosen deployment.

Warning

Despite significant similarities between MariaDB and MySQL, we DO NOT support MariaDB as a backend for Airflow. There are known problems (for example index handling) between MariaDB and MySQL and we do not test our migration scripts nor application execution on Maria DB. We know there were people who used MariaDB for Airflow and that cause a lot of operational headache for them so we strongly discourage attempts to use MariaDB as a backend and users cannot expect any community support for it because the number of users who tried to use MariaDB for Airflow is very small.

Warning

SQLite is used in Airflow tests. DO NOT use it in production. We recommend using the latest stable version of SQLite for local development.

Warning

Airflow® currently can be run on POSIX-compliant Operating Systems. For development it is regularly tested on fairly modern Linux distributions that our contributors use and recent versions of MacOS. On Windows you can run it via WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2) or via Linux Containers. The work to add Windows support is tracked via #10388 but it is not a high priority. You should only use Linux-based distributions as “Production environment” as this is the only environment that is supported. The only distribution that is used in our CI tests and that is used in the Community managed DockerHub image is Debian Bookworm.