How to set a different retry delay for every task in an Airflow DAG

This article is a part of my "100 data engineering tutorials in 100 days" challenge. (72/100)

When we configure an Airflow DAG, we set the default values of various properties, for example, the retry delay. What should we do when we want to overwrite the delay in an Airflow task? What if we’re going to use a different delay in every task?

In this case, we have to include the retry_delay parameter in the constructor of Airflow operators, which delay we want to change. Every Airflow operator supports this parameter because it is defined in the BaseOperator. For the same reason, it is easy to overlook its existence because Airflow documentation does not show the parameters inherited from base classes.

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Bartosz Mikulski

Bartosz Mikulski

  • MLOps engineer by day
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