Is there a way to view a list of all airflow workers?

Question

New to Airflow, so apologies if this question doesn't really make sense. Is there a command or place in the webserver UI where one can see a list of all running workers? Also, if a Celery worker node is not explicitly started with airflow worker, are there "default" workers that are initialized with either the webserver or scheduler?

Answer 1

Reguarding this part of your question:

Also, if a Celery worker node is not explicitly started with airflow worker, are there "default" workers that are initialized with either the webserver or scheduler?

Take a look at the docs on executors.

Using celery requires some configuration changes. If you haven't configured airflow to use celery, then even if you start a celery worker, the worker won't pick up any tasks.

Conversely, if you have configured airflow to use celery, and you have not started any celery workers, then your cluster will not execute a single task.

If you are using SequentialExecutor (the default) or LocalExecutor (requires configuration), with both of these executors, tasks are executed by the scheduler, and no celery workers are used (and if you spun some up, then they wouldn't execute any tasks).

Regarding this:

Is there a way to view a list of all airflow workers?

If you have configured airflow to use celery, then you can run flower to see monitoring of celery workers. In airflow >= 2.0.0 flower is launched with airflow celery flower.