How to deal with the jinja2 TemplateNotFound error in Airflow

How to fix the TemplateNotFound error while using a custom Airflow operator

Bartosz Mikulski 19 Oct 2020 – 2 min read

Occasionally, when we are making a custom Airflow operator, we may end up in a situation when Airflow complains about not existing jinja template. It may happen when we have an Airflow operator, which calls another operator inside its execute function when both operators have a common template field.

In this situation, Airflow may raise an error saying that: jinja2.exception.TemplateNotFound: content_of_the_field. It is strange because if we have not used a jinja template inside the field value, we may expect it to pass the string without using it as a template. Unfortunately, that does not happen.

Dealing with the issue is quite simple. The wrapping Airflow operator should include the field’s content as a jinja constant and pass it into the inner operator. For example, when our code looks like this:

class SomeOperator(BaseOperator):

    template_fields = ('the_field')

    def __init__(self, field, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.field = field
        self.extra_args = args
        self.extra_kwargs = kwargs

    def execute(self, context):
        self.another_operator = SomeOtherOperator(field=self.field, *self.extra_args, **self.extra_kwargs)
        self.another_operator.execute(context)

We can fix the jinja template issue like this:

class SomeOperator(BaseOperator):

    template_fields = ('the_field')

    def __init__(self, field, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self.field = "{{ '" + field + "' }}"
        self.extra_args = args
        self.extra_kwargs = kwargs

    ... rest of the code

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