Get an XCom value in the Airflow on_failure_callback function

This article is a part of my "100 data engineering tutorials in 100 days" challenge. (93/100)

When we want to get an XCom variable in the on_failure_callback, we will face a nasty bug. Using the ti key to retrieve a value from the context gives us a None value.

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# This does not work
context.get("ti").xcom_pull(key="test")

It happens because in the on_failure_callback the task instance is passed to the function using the task_instance key. Therefore to get a value from XCom, we must execute this code:

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task: TaskInstance = context.get('task_instance')
task.xcom_pull(key="test")

Alternatively, we can import XCom and access it directly:

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from airflow.models import XCom
XCom.get_one(execution_date = context.get('execution_date'), key='test')

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Bartosz Mikulski

Bartosz Mikulski

  • MLOps engineer by day
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