When you first run Airflow, it automatically generates airflow.cfg in your $AIRFLOW_HOME directory, which is typically ~/airflow by default. This file is organized into sections (e.g., [core] , [webserver] , [scheduler] ) that govern different components of the Airflow ecosystem. Key Configuration Sections
: Controls how the scheduler identifies and kicks off tasks. Important settings include dag_dir_list_interval , which determines how often the scheduler scans for new DAG files.
: Manages the Airflow UI settings, such as the port it runs on and security parameters like secret keys.
: The hardcoded defaults within the Airflow source code if no other value is provided. Performance Tuning data-engineering/airflow/airflow.cfg at main - GitHub
While airflow.cfg is the primary configuration file, Airflow follows a specific order of precedence for settings:
