Managing Airflow at Scale using the Flowrs TUI

Jan opens 12 browser tabs every morning to check overnight pipelines. Log in, check, close. Twelve times. So he built a terminal app instead.

Flowrs is a TUI for Apache Airflow written in Rust. Navigate all your environments from the keyboard, drill into failed tasks, tail live logs, bulk-mark runs -- no browser, no mouse. In this episode Jan demos it live, walks through the architecture of a TUI (event loop, state, render), compares the main frameworks (Ratatui, Bubble Tea, Textual), and gives his honest take on whether agents will eventually replace tools like this.

"Go forth and mulTUIply. Life is too short to click around."

Resources:
- Install Flowrs: brew install flowrs
- GitHub: https://github.com/janbvanbuel/flowrs

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Click here to watch a video of this episode.
Full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ_da7qdfL80rA7byzC_CmyrfJWjcCTnb

  • (00:00) - Introduction
  • (01:17) - What is Flowrs & Airflow?
  • (03:27) - Demo: Flowrs in action
  • (10:18) - The evolution of CLIs and TUIs
  • (13:07) - Why not just use agents?
  • (14:25) - TUI frameworks: Bubble Tea, Textual, Ratatui
  • (15:21) - What's up with the Rust hype?
  • (16:51) - Building the Flowrs UI
  • (19:20) - How to install Flowrs yourself
  • (22:34) - Takeaways & what's next

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Data & AI: Technology Explorations is a biweekly show from Dataminded. Each episode a Dataminded engineer demos a tool or technique worth knowing about -- working code, honest takes, no hype.

Music by Aleksandr Karabanov from Pixabay

Creators and Guests

Jonny Daenen
Host
Jonny Daenen
Head of Knowledge at Dataminded
Jan Vanbuel
Guest
Jan Vanbuel
Team Lead at Dataminded
Managing Airflow at Scale using the Flowrs TUI
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