Create Airflow roles with permissions from cli

Create roles with dag-level permissions for Airflow directly from cli instead of UI

Image by author

Become admin

Airflow offers a way to manage permissions for multiple users via the RBAC roles. These permissions can be edited directly from the UI of Airflow (RBAC is activated by default using Airflow ≥ 2.0.

Image by author. UI view of default RBAC roles in Airflow

The roles can be accessed only if the connected user has the role Admin.

By default, when you connect to Airflow for the first time, the role is Op, which is the second higher role after Admin. This role does not have sufficient permissions to manage roles. In order to become Admin, use this command:

airflow users add-role -e your_email -r Admin

Now that you are Admin, refresh the Airflow page and you should access the Security menu with the roles and permissions.

You shall see that it is possible to edit roles and permissions directly from the UI. It is also possible to create dag-level permissions, which are permissions applied only for a given dag. Now imagine you want some users to only…