Installing Airflow locally on Windows with WSL and Astro CLI (quickest setup ever)

This guide uses the Astro CLI to install Airflow quickly. This is roughly based on the guide provided by Astronomer — but in my case, since I am running Windows 10.0, I was never able to get the mounting to work. I also suspect the guide is slightly outdated.

So I’m sharing my personal experience of how I got it installed and working.

Install WSL

WSL stands for Windows Subsystem for Linux, which allows us to run Linux on Windows very simply, removing the need of dual-booting or setting up a virutal machine.

First, make sure you have installed WSL. If not, follow this doc from Microsoft.

• The tl;dr is open Powershell in Windows while right-clicking on it and selecting “Run as administrator”.
• Run this:

• Restart your computer.
• Open your newly installed Ubuntu by going to Start Menu → Ubuntu
• Enter a username and password for yourself
• Run this:

• Confirm that Python is installed with python3 --version
• Install pip: sudo apt update , sudo apt install python3-pip
• Run pip3 --version to confirm successful installation.

Install Docker Desktop on Windows

• Now go back to Windows. Download and install Docker Desktop
• Ensure the Use WSL 2 instead of Hyper-V option on the Configuration page is selected
• Open Docker Desktop
• Go to Settings -> Resources -> WSL Integration

• Make sure you have Ubuntu turned on

Install VS Code on Windows

I’m not sure if this would work with any other IDE, but VS Code has this native integration with WSL2 that makes it super easy to develop with.

So make sure you have Visual Studio Code installed on your Windows

Install Airflow on Ubuntu

• Now open your Ubuntu terminal again.
• Run pip3 install apache-airflow
• Run nano ~/.bashrc
• Add line export AIRFLOW_HOME=/home/wynnelo/AirflowHome (obviously replacing wynnelo with your own username)
• cd /home/wynnelo and mkdir AirflowHome

Install Astro CLI on Ubuntu

• In your Ubuntu terminal, type in curl -sSL https://install.astronomer.io | sudo bash
• Run astro --version to verify successful installation
• cd /home/wynnelo/AirflowHome
• Now initialize your Astro project: astro dev init — use-astronomer-certified
• Then astro dev start to start your local Airflow
• Navigate to http://localhost:8080/ and you should see your local Airflow set up and running!

How to edit the code?

• All you have to do is cd /home/wynnelo/AirflowHome on your Ubuntu terminal
• Then type code . which should launch Visual Studio Code on your current directory on Ubuntu!
• You can then proceed to edit code as usual and save as usual.