Airflow authentication setups fails with "AttributeError: can't set attribute"

Question

The Airflow version 1.8 password authentication setup as described in the docs fails at the step

user.password = 'set_the_password'

with error

AttributeError: can't set attribute

Answer 1

It's better to simply use the new method of PasswordUser _set_password:

 # Instead of user.password = 'password'
 user._set_password = 'password'

Answer 2

This is due to an update of SqlAlchemy to a version >= 1.2 that introduced a backwards incompatible change.

You can fix this by explicitly installing a SqlAlchemy version <1.2.

pip install 'sqlalchemy<1.2'

Or in a requirement.txt

sqlalchemy<1.2

Answer 3

Fixed with

pip install 'sqlalchemy<1.2'

I'm using apache-airflow 1.8.2