Integrate Mage into an existing Airflow project

​

1. Add mage-ai as a dependency in Airflow

Open the requirements.txt file in the root directory of your Airflow project, and add the mage-ai library:

mage-ai

​

2. Install Mage tool

You can install and run Mage using Docker or using pip.

​

Using Docker

docker pull mageai/mageai:latest

​

Using pip

pip install mage-ai

​

3. Initialize Mage project

Change directory into your Airflow’s DAGs folder. This is typically in the folder dags/.

cd dags

Then, initialize a new Mage project in the dags/ folder.

If you’re using Docker, run the following command in the dags/ folder:

docker run -it -p 6789:6789 -v $(pwd):/home/src \
  /app/run_app.sh mageai/mageai mage init demo_project

If you used pip to install Mage, run the following command in the dags/ folder:

mage init demo_project

Once finished, you should have a folder named demo_project inside your dags/ folder.

Your current folder structure should look like this:

airflow_root_directory/
| -- dags/
| -- | -- demo_project/

​

4. Create one-time DAG for pipelines

In the dags/ folder, create a new file named create_mage_pipelines.py.

Then, add the following code:

from airflow import DAG
from airflow.operators.python_operator import PythonOperator
from datetime import datetime
from mage_ai.orchestration.airflow import create_dags
import os


ABSOLUTE_PATH = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
project_path = os.path.join(ABSOLUTE_PATH, 'demo_project')

create_dags(
    project_path,
    DAG,
    PythonOperator,
    dag_settings=dict(
        start_date=datetime(2022, 8, 5),  # Change this to any start date you want
    ),
    globals_dict=globals(),
)

​

5. Create pipeline

​

5a. Start Mage

In the dags/ folder, start the Mage tool.

If you’re using Docker, run the following command in the dags/ folder:

docker run -it -p 6789:6789 -v $(pwd):/home/src \
  /app/run_app.sh mageai/mageai mage start demo_project

If you used pip to install Mage, run the following command in the dags/ folder:

mage start demo_project

Open http://localhost:6789 in your browser.

​

5b. Create a pipeline and add a block

Follow steps 1, 2, and 4 in this tutorial to create a new pipeline, add 1 data loader block, and add 1 transformer block.

​

6. Run DAG in Airflow for pipeline

1. Open the Airflow webserver UI at http://localhost:8080 in your browser.
2. If you named your pipeline etl demo based on the tutorial from the previous step, then find a DAG named mage_pipeline_etl_demo. If you named it something else, find a DAG with the prefix mage_pipeline_.
3. Click on the DAG to view the detail page. The URL could typically be this: http://localhost:8080/admin/airflow/tree?dag_id=mage_pipeline_etl_demo.
4. Turn that DAG on if its currently off.
5. Trigger a new DAG run.
6. Watch the DAG as it runs each task according to the pipeline you created in Mage.