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I'm trying to run this upstart script from the official repo for airflow: https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow/blob/master/scripts/upstart/airflow-webserver.conf

start on started networking
stop on (deconfiguring-networking or runlevel [016])

respawn
respawn limit 5 30

setuid airflow
setgid airflow

exec usr/local/bin/airflow webserver

When I run it this is the output:

$ sudo service airflow-webserver start
airflow-webserver start/running, process 7612

$ sudo service airflow-webserver status
airflow-webserver stop/waiting

But just doing exec /usr/local/bin/airflow webserver will run it perfectly without any hiccups, which is puzzling. Does anyone know why this is happening?

* You can get airflow with pip install airflow to test in case you need to see for yourselves.

Answers

Upstart runs in a clean environment, meaning that it won't use the variables in /etc/environment. This means you have to set AIRFLOW_HOME and AIRFLOW_CONFIG again.

description "Airflow webserver daemon"

start on started networking
stop on (deconfiguring-networking or runlevel [016])

respawn
respawn limit 5 30

setuid airflow
setgid airflow

# I omitted all of the below because I assumed 
# it would pick it up from the already defined env
env AIRFLOW_CONFIG=/path/to/airflow/airflow.cfg
env AIRFLOW_HOME=/path/to/airflow
export AIRFLOW_CONFIG
export AIRFLOW_HOME

exec usr/local/bin/airflow webserver