How to point to the airflow unittest.cfg?

Question

Airflow creates a unittest.cfg file in the AIRFLOW_HOME environment variable path.

My question is: how can I point to unittest.cfg in the same why that I point to the airflow.cfg via the environment variable AIRFLOW_CONFIG?

The reason why I want to do this is because I don't want to have any config files in the AIRFLOW_HOME directory.

Also, if anyone knows better, could you please explain what is the unittest.cfg is for as there is no documentation I could find on it.

Answer 1

unittest.cfg test configuration file is the default configuration file used when Airflow is running in test mode.

Test mode can be activated by setting the unit_test_mode configuration option in airflow.cfg or AIRFLOW__CORE__UNIT_TEST_MODE environment variable to True .

The configuration values in test configuration file overwrite those in airflow.cfg in runtime when test mode is activated.

# Source: https://github.com/apache/airflow/blob/1.10.5/airflow/configuration.py#L558,L561
def get_airflow_test_config(airflow_home):
    if 'AIRFLOW_TEST_CONFIG' not in os.environ:
        return os.path.join(airflow_home, 'unittests.cfg')
    return expand_env_var(os.environ['AIRFLOW_TEST_CONFIG'])

The AIRFLOW_TEST_CONFIG environment variable can be set to the path of your test configuration file.