execution_date in airflow: need to access as a variable

The PythonOperator constructor takes a 'provide_context' parameter (see https://pythonhosted.org/airflow/code.html). If it's True, then it passes a number of parameters into the python_callable via kwargs. kwargs['execution_date'] is what you want, I believe.

Something like this:

def python_method(ds, **kwargs):
    Variable.set('execution_date', kwargs['execution_date'])
    return

doit = PythonOperator(
    task_id='doit',
    provide_context=True,
    python_callable=python_method,
    dag=dag)

I'm not sure how to do it with the BashOperator, but you might start with this issue: https://github.com/airbnb/airflow/issues/775

The BashOperator's bash_command argument is a template. You can access execution_date in any template as a datetime object using the execution_date variable. In the template, you can use any jinja2 methods to manipulate it.

Using the following as your BashOperator bash_command string:

# pass in the first of the current month
some_command.sh {{ execution_date.replace(day=1) }}

# last day of previous month
some_command.sh {{ execution_date.replace(day=1) - macros.timedelta(days=1) }}

If you just want the string equivalent of the execution date, ds will return a datestamp (YYYY-MM-DD), ds_nodash returns same without dashes (YYYYMMDD), etc. More on macros is available in the Api Docs.

---

Your final operator would look like:

command = """curl -XPOST '%(hostname)s:8000/run?st={{ ds }}'""" % locals()
t1 = BashOperator( task_id='rest-api-1', bash_command=command, dag=dag)