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DAG authoring

Author a DAG: dexaflow.yaml plus dag.py compiled to one immutable artifact.

A Dexaflow DAG is two files in a project directory, compiled into an immutable artifact (dag.json + a container image, versioned together — ADR 0003).

dags/my_pipeline/
  dag.py         # real Apache Airflow SDK 3.2.x code
  dexaflow.yaml   # Dexaflow deploy config (not an Airflow file)

Scaffold one with dexaflow init dags/my_pipeline.

Workspace layout (multi-DAG)

Lite-specific. The hot-reload watcher exists only in dexaflow lite — the developer-mode loop. At runtime Pro has no “workspace”: every DAG ships as its own image-and-dag.json pair, built by CI and registered via dexaflow push dag.json, and the control plane never sees a directory of siblings. See The development → deploy lifecycle.
The same discovery does run at build time in Pro, in one place: dexaflow build [workspace] walks a directory of projects and builds each with its own registry:. That is a convenience for the person at the keyboard — it produces the same one-image-per-DAG artifacts and changes nothing about how Pro runs them.

dexaflow lite watches a workspace that can hold many DAGs as sibling subdirectories. The default workspace is ~/dexaflow/ (set by dexaflow setup).

~/dexaflow/                      # workspace root
  recurring_print/               # one DAG project per subdir
    dexaflow.yaml
    dag.py
  recurring_parallel/
    dexaflow.yaml
    dag.py
  ml/
    train/                       # nested subdirs are scanned too
      dexaflow.yaml
      dag.py

Recommended layout (best practice, not enforced): name the subdirectory the same as the dag_id. The binding is by dag_id (yaml field, or the subdir basename when no yaml is present — see below), but matching names make the workspace navigable by humans and grep-friendly. ~/dexaflow/sales_etl/ for a DAG named sales_etl.

Discovery rules

dexaflow lite — and dexaflow build, which shares the same discovery — walks the workspace and treats every subdirectory containing a dag.py (with or without a dexaflow.yaml) as a project. The scan:

Goes at most 5 levels deep from the workspace root. A DAG at <ws>/a/b/c/d/dag.py is the deepest valid case. Deeper paths are skipped.
Skips .git, __pycache__, .venv, venv, and any hidden directory (.*). That list mirrors the exclude_paths default so the scan and an image build agree on what counts as noise — but discovery has its own copy and never reads your exclude_paths, so changing that value does not change what the scan walks.
Fails loud on a duplicate dag_id: if two subdirs resolve to the same id, lite refuses to compile any of them and prints both paths so you can rename one. There is no last-write-wins.

Every compile log line names the resolved config source — either the absolute path of the dexaflow.yaml that was loaded, or auto-defaults: <subdir> when none exists. This is the one line to grep when “which config did it pick up?” is the debugging question.

`dexaflow.yaml` is optional

A subdir with just a dag.py is a valid project. Dexaflow synthesizes a config with dag_id = <subdir-basename> and every other field filled from the schema defaults (see Configuration → Defaults). Add a dexaflow.yaml when you need to pin a Python version, declare dependencies, set per-task overrides, or change the dag_id to something other than the subdir name.

dag.py — the Airflow dialect

dag.py is real Airflow SDK 3.2.x code, imported by the Python parser via the Airflow DagBag. TaskFlow and classic operators both work:

from airflow.sdk import DAG, task

@task
def extract() -> dict:
    return {"rows": 100}

@task
def transform(data: dict) -> dict:
    return {"rows": data["rows"], "doubled": data["rows"] * 2}

with DAG("my_pipeline", schedule="@daily", catchup=False, tags=["etl"]):
    transform(extract())

A DAG starts paused the first time it is deployed to Pro, as in Airflow, so its schedule waits for an unpause. Pass is_paused_upon_creation=False to DAG(...) or @dag(...) to have it start active (True keeps it paused on a server configured otherwise). It only matters on that first deploy; see New DAGs start paused.

from airflow.sdk import … is the canonical Airflow 3 spelling and what we recommend. The deprecated-but-still-valid Airflow 3 aliases resolve to the same objects, so a migrated DAG compiles unchanged:

from airflow.decorators import task, dag → the airflow.sdk decorators.
from airflow import DAG → airflow.sdk.DAG.

The core airflow.operators.* operators, however, were removed from Airflow in 3.0 and relocated to apache-airflow-providers-standard. Importing one (e.g. from airflow.operators.bash import BashOperator) fails the compile with a message pointing at the replacement — use from airflow.providers.standard.operators.bash import BashOperator instead.

Supported task types

Dexaflow runs the common types on a native fast path and everything else — any of Airflow’s ~1,500 provider operators and poke-mode sensors — through a generic executor, native-first by type. Nothing is silently dropped or mistranslated.

Task type	Airflow operator	Where it runs	Notes
`python`	`@task` (TaskFlow) or `PythonOperator`	agent in a pod (Pro) / subprocess (Lite)	The general-purpose escape hatch — any provider library you `pip install` is callable from inside a `@task`.
`bash`	`BashOperator`	agent	Executes a shell command.
~~`http_api`~~ (removed)	—	—	Removed (ADR 0047/0048, #512). `HttpOperator` now compiles to `airflow_operator` and runs in a pod, like any other provider operator — declare `connectors: [http]`. The old inline path ran the request in the control-plane process (an SSRF surface) and is gone.
`airflow_operator`	any provider operator/sensor (Snowflake, S3, Postgres, BigQuery, …)	agent in a pod	The generic executor (ADR 0040): the runtime imports the class, instantiates it with your args, and calls `execute()`. Declare the provider or compile fails.

Bash templating: values are shell-quoted, the template text is not

A bash_command is Jinja-rendered with the run context ({{ ds }}, {{ params.x }}, {{ var.value.x }}). The command text you write is the shell structure and is used verbatim; every interpolated value is automatically shell-quoted (shlex.quote) before it reaches bash -c. This is a security boundary: params is the run’s conf, which anyone who can trigger the DAG supplies (execute:dag, a lower bar than authoring it), so an un-quoted value would let a trigger inject arbitrary shell (issue #489).

A command whose template cannot render (an undefined name such as {{ nope.x }}, a syntax error, or an expression the sandbox refuses) fails the attempt without running, and the task log names bash_command and the Jinja error. The raw {{ ... }} text is never run (ADR 0084).

Braces meant for another tool, such as docker ps --format '{{.Names}}', are read as Jinja too and fail to parse. Wrap them in a raw block, as on Airflow: docker ps --format '{% raw %}{{.Names}}{% endraw %}'.

Practical consequence — write interpolations unquoted, and do not wrap them in your own quotes:

✅ process --name {{ params.name }} — the value is quoted for you.
❌ process --name "{{ params.name }}" — your quotes fight the auto-quoting.
A value can no longer expand into multiple shell words/flags; if you need that, pass the pieces as separate params and interpolate each. For secrets, reference $AIRFLOW_VAR_* / $AIRFLOW_CONN_* env vars instead of rendering them into the command (see below).

Never render a secret into a bash command

Quoting stops a value from becoming shell syntax, but a rendered value is still part of the command line. The command line is argv of the bash process: anything that can list processes in the same container (ps, /proc/<pid>/cmdline, a debug sidecar, node tooling with host PID access, or any process of the same user on a Lite host) reads it, and set -x, error messages and argument-logging wrappers copy it into the task log.

A Variable or Connection the task receives is already in its environment as AIRFLOW_VAR_<KEY> or AIRFLOW_CONN_<ID>, so reference it by name and let bash expand it at run time. On an install that runs auth.secret_scoping: enforce, the task receives only the names its DAG declares in dexaflow.yaml (Declare what a task consumes), and an undeclared one expands to an empty string. The templated form has the same requirement, so declare what the command uses either way:

# Wrong: the token is rendered into the command line.
BashOperator(task_id="deploy", bash_command="deploy-tool --token {{ var.value.api_token }}")

# Right: the command line carries only the variable name.
BashOperator(task_id="deploy", bash_command='DEPLOY_TOKEN="$AIRFLOW_VAR_API_TOKEN" deploy-tool')

{{ var.value.x }} and {{ conn.x }} stay supported for non-secret configuration (a bucket name, a schema, a host), for Airflow parity.
A Variable is $AIRFLOW_VAR_<KEY> (key uppercased); a Connection is $AIRFLOW_CONN_<ID>, a URI. In a @task, use Variable.get and BaseHook.get_connection instead.
Put the reference in double quotes ("$AIRFLOW_VAR_API_KEY") so bash does not split a value with spaces.
The second example hands the token to the tool through its own environment variable. A tool that only takes a secret as a flag (--token "$AIRFLOW_VAR_API_TOKEN") still receives it in its own argv, so prefer the tool’s environment variable or a file (in the task’s scratch, never the project directory) when it offers one.

The rule and its reasoning are in ADR 0070.

Also supported:

Trigger rules: all_success, all_failed, all_done, one_success, one_failed.
XCom: TaskFlow data-flow (transform(extract())) is resolved automatically into typed inputs (xcom_input) — for @task and operator args.
Schedule: cron strings and presets (@daily, 0 * * * *).
Dependencies: linear ordering via TaskFlow calls or a >> b.
.override(...) on a @task: estimate.override(task_id="estimate_03")(3) builds the task with different operator arguments, as in Airflow. It takes the same arguments as @task(...) (task_id, retries, retry_delay, execution_timeout, trigger_rule, pool_slots, …), merged over the decorator’s, and leaves the decorated function unchanged. A repeated task_id gets the usual __1, __2 suffix. Two limits: on_failure_callback is refused in .override(...) (set it on @task(...), where the runtime reads it), and .override(...).expand(...) is refused like any dynamic task mapping.

Connector cookbooks (postgres, mysql, sqlite, redis, http) are python tasks that read a managed Connection (AIRFLOW_CONN_*) — that is the hook-inside-@task style. The airflow_operator type below is the operator-class style; both resolve the same managed connections.

Provider operators & sensors (`airflow_operator`)

Write the operator exactly as you would in Airflow — Dexaflow captures it and runs it in its own task pod:

from airflow.sdk import DAG, task
from airflow.providers.snowflake.operators.snowflake import SQLExecuteQueryOperator

@task
def build_sql() -> str:
    return "SELECT count(*) FROM events"

with DAG("rollup", schedule="@daily"):
    # an upstream task's output flows straight into an operator arg
    SQLExecuteQueryOperator(task_id="rollup", conn_id="snowflake_default",
                            sql=build_sql())

# dexaflow.yaml — installs apache-airflow-providers-snowflake into the image
connectors: [snowflake]      # or: dependencies: [apache-airflow-providers-snowflake]

How it works, and the Phase-A limits:

The operator runs in its own task pod; its hooks resolve connections from AIRFLOW_CONN_* exactly as inside a @task.
Constructor args must be JSON-serializable or an upstream task’s output (wired as XCom, like sql=build_sql() above). A non-serializable arg — a callable, a datetime, an arbitrary object — is a loud compile error; move that logic into a @task.
Literal args are for small constants. A task’s literal args (@task call_args and operator operator_args) ride as a single environment variable at dispatch, which POSIX caps at ~128 KiB; dexaflow compile rejects a payload over 100 KiB with a clear error naming the task. For large data, pass a Connection or an external-storage reference (S3/GCS) and fetch it inside the task — never a big dict/list literal.
The provider must be declared in dexaflow.yaml (connectors: or dependencies:). If it isn’t, dexaflow compile fails and prints the exact line to add — no surprise ModuleNotFoundError in the pod.
Sensors run in poke mode by default (the pod holds until the condition is met), or mode="reschedule" (ADR 0040 Phase B, #380/#389) — the pod is released between pokes and the scheduler re-dispatches the sensor, preserving its try_number, once its next-poke time passes.
Jinja templating renders the operator’s template_fields with the run context ({{ ds }}, {{ logical_date }}, {{ macros.ds_add(ds, 1) }}, {{ params.x }}, {{ var.value.x }}). A field that fails to render fails the task attempt before execute(), with the field and the Jinja error in the task log, as on Airflow (ADR 0084). For a context key Dexaflow does not provide yet, compute the value in a @task and pass it in.
A native task type (bash/python) always wins when it matches, so BashOperator/HttpOperator/PythonOperator keep their fast path.

Not supported — `dexaflow compile` rejects these

If your DAG uses any of these, compile fails — by design

The contract is loud rejection, not silent mistranslation: every “skipped” branch would otherwise actually execute at runtime, so a DAG that imports a sensor or interpolates a Jinja template is refused at compile with a clear error naming the construct (#225).

The unsupported set, with the things Airflow users most often expect to “just work” called out first:

Deferrable operators / sensors — anything with deferrable=True (it suspends the task onto a trigger) is not supported yet: Dexaflow has no triggerer (ADR 0040 Phase C). It fails at runtime with a clear message. Pass deferrable=False — the operator runs synchronously in the pod (poke-style).
Jinja templating in @task — {{ ds }}, {{ ti }}, {{ var.value.x }}, every templates_dict= knob. The control plane never re-parses Python and the templating step is intentionally not implemented. Workaround: build the values inside the @task from airflow.sdk context.
Branching (BranchPythonOperator, @task.branch) and short-circuit (@task.short_circuit, ShortCircuitOperator) — refused for now: the current scheduler does not model skipped-vs-executed downstream paths. On the backlog if user demand justifies the scheduler change.
Virtualenv operators (PythonVirtualenvOperator, @task.virtualenv) — refused because each DAG already ships as its own image with its own dependencies; spinning up a venv at runtime is the problem Dexaflow’s one-image-per-DAG model already solved.
Dynamic task mapping (.expand / .partial) — refused. Static fan-in (collecting a list of task calls into a downstream task) works today; what does not work is dynamic fan-out — expanding one task into N parallel instances at runtime from an upstream result. That is tracked separately.
KubernetesPodOperator — refused; the pod is the runtime substrate for every Dexaflow task already, so wrapping a user task in another pod is redundant and adds an isolation hole.
Datasets / Assets triggers — not implemented yet; the asset graph is a 3.x Airflow feature on the backlog.
Per-task default_args in dag.py are ignored at the parser level — use dexaflow.yaml’s tasks.<id>: override block instead, which is checked at compile time.

Run parameters and their schemas

params= on the DAG declares the parameters a run accepts, as in Airflow. A bare value is a default; a Param adds a JSON Schema built from its keyword arguments, and a Param without a default is required:

from airflow.sdk import DAG, Param

with DAG(
    "my_pipeline",
    params={
        "limit": Param(100, type="integer", minimum=1),
        "region": Param(type="string", enum=["us", "eu"]),
    },
):
    ...

The control plane checks the schemas when the DAG is registered and validates a run’s conf against them when the run is triggered. A task’s xcom_schema in dag.json works the same way for the value the task pushes. These schemas may $ref only into themselves (#/$defs/...) and the standard JSON Schema meta-schemas. Since 0.5.1 any other reference, such as a file:// URL or a relative path, is refused with a schema error at registration, at trigger or at the push, so inline what a schema needs instead of pointing at a file.

A task sees params ({{ params.x }}, context["params"]) the way Airflow builds them: the DAG’s declared defaults, then the task’s own params=, then the run’s conf, each one winning over the one before for the same key. Since 0.5.5 this holds for every run: a scheduled run, which carries no conf, still gets the DAG defaults, and an operator’s params= is part of its template context. Since 0.5.5 the same holds for the params= of a BashOperator and of @task(params=...), which the compiler now carries in dag.json. A task param must be JSON-serializable, or dexaflow compile fails naming it. context["dag_run"].conf is the run’s conf alone, without the defaults. A manual trigger stores the declared defaults in the run’s conf, as the Airflow UI’s trigger form does, so on such a run a DAG default wins over a task param of the same name.

Clearing a task

Clearing a task (the UI’s Clear, or POST /api/v2/dags/{dag_id}/clearTaskInstances) runs it again as a new try with a full retry budget, as Apache Airflow does:

the budget is the retries of the DAG version the re-run executes, so a task with retries: 3 gets three retries after a clear, whatever it spent before;
its infra re-placements are reset, so it can survive a lost agent again;
the XCom values of the attempts it clears are deleted, so a downstream task cannot read a value the new attempt did not write;
on_failure_callback fires only on the final attempt.

The clear is one transaction: if the XCom values cannot be deleted, nothing is cleared and the request fails. Before 0.5.1 a clear kept the spent retries, and the UI could show “try 4 of 3”.

Clearing onto the current version

By default a clear re-runs the version the run was created with. To re-run on the DAG’s current version, tick “Run with latest bundle version” in the Clear dialog, or send run_on_latest_version: true. As in Airflow, this moves the run only when the run has finished (success or failed) and none of its task instances is queued or running. The run then takes the current version’s tasks in the same transaction:

a task the version adds gets a task instance and runs in the re-opened run;
a task the version dropped keeps its task instance, history and logs, in the new state removed. It is not run, and it does not count toward the run’s outcome;
a removed task whose task a later version declares again runs again as a new try.

A clear that names a task the current version dropped resets nothing for it. See ADR 0086 for the reasoning.

Clearing a run that is still running

A run that is queued or running, or a finished run that still has a task instance queued or running (marked failed or success while that task ran), keeps its DAG version. Asking for the current version does not move it:

the cleared tasks re-run on the run’s own version, with that version’s retries, as a clear without the option would;
tasks already running finish on the image they started with;
the response says the option was not applied, and why. Both clear routes, dry run included, add run_on_latest_version_not_applied, one entry per run with its dag_run_id and a reason such as the run is running: only a finished run moves to the current version. The run’s version in the UI stays the one it had. The Clear dialog of the Airflow UI that Dexaflow ships does not display this field, so read it from the API when you need the reason.

To run the cleared tasks on the current version, first get the run to a finished state with no task queued or running, then clear again with the option:

wait for the run to finish, or mark it failed or success (the run page’s Mark run as, or PATCH /api/v2/dags/{dag_id}/dagRuns/{dag_run_id} with a state);
if you marked it while a task was still running, wait for that task to end;
clear again with run_on_latest_version: true.

Or trigger a new run, which always uses the current version.

For example, with etl still running on version 3 while version 4 is current:

curl -sS -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  "$DEXAFLOW_URL/api/v2/dags/etl/dagRuns/$RUN_ID/clear" \
  -d '{"dry_run": true, "run_on_latest_version": true}' | jq .run_on_latest_version_not_applied

[
  {
    "dag_run_id": "manual__2026-10-16T09:00:00+00:00",
    "reason": "the run is running: only a finished run moves to the current version"
  }
]

Once the run has finished, the same dry run answers no run_on_latest_version_not_applied, and the clear with "dry_run": false moves the run to version 4.

dexaflow.yaml — deploy config

These are Dexaflow concerns, not Airflow operator attributes (you cannot invent kwargs on an operator — the parser imports real Airflow and would raise).

schema_version: "1.0"
dag_id: my_pipeline
description: Daily ETL.
owner: data-eng
tags: [etl]
python_version: "3.11"
dependencies:           # pip packages baked into the image
  - pandas==2.1.0
defaults:               # DAG-level defaults (applied to every task)
  retries: 1
  retry_delay_seconds: 30
staging:                # opt-in shared per-run RWX volume (ADR 0022)
  enabled: false
tasks:                  # per-task overrides, keyed by task_id (ADR 0023)
  transform:
    retries: 3
    resources:
      requests: { cpu: "2", memory: 4Gi }

Binding + override layers (ADR 0023)

Config binds to the DAG by dag_id and to tasks by task_id. Three layers, most specific wins:

task override (tasks.<id>)  >  DAG default (defaults)  >  platform default (server)

tasks.<id> is merged at compile time onto the task in dag.json.
Platform defaults are applied at dispatch time, filling gaps the artifact left empty (keeps the artifact portable across clusters) — but wholesale: if a task declares any resources at all, even only ephemeral_storage, the platform cpu/memory default does not apply to it (#802).
staging is DAG-level only — one RWX volume is shared atomically by the whole run, so it cannot be per-task.

Task size (`size`, ADR 0066)

size is how many slots of its pool a task takes while it is queued or running: Airflow’s pool_slots. It defaults to 1, so a pool of 8 slots runs eight tasks of size 1, or two of size 4. A task that does not fit waits until enough slots free up; it never fails for it. Smaller tasks cannot keep a task of more than one slot out forever: once it has waited past scheduler.pool_starvation_threshold (60s by default), the pool holds new admissions until it fits. Tasks of size 1 never reserve a pool.

The Pools screen and /api/v2/pools count slots the same way: two tasks of size 4 running in a pool of 8 show 8 occupied slots and 0 open, and each state’s count (running_slots, queued_slots, scheduled_slots, deferred_slots) is the sum of its tasks’ sizes. A task’s size and pool are recorded when its run starts, and a clear takes both from the version the re-run executes, so a task a newer version moved to another pool is charged there once it is cleared onto that version. The API’s task instances report the same pool and pool_slots.

defaults:
  size: 1          # every task that sets none
tasks:
  train:
    size: 4        # this task takes 4 slots

@task(pool_slots=4) or an operator’s pool_slots=4 in dag.py sets the same thing. Most specific wins: tasks.<id>.size > pool_slots in dag.py > defaults.size > 1. Pools are enforced on Pro only; Lite ignores the size.

When the operator sets a resource unit (executor.unit, for example 250m CPU and 512Mi memory per slot), the size also sizes the pod: a task of size 4 gets 1 CPU and 2Gi wherever it does not set cpu or memory itself, and a task whose own resources ask for more than size x unit is refused when the DAG is registered, with the size it would need.

Guardrails (fail loudly, never silently)

A tasks: entry naming a task_id absent from the DAG → compile error.
A duplicate task_id key in the YAML → parse error.
Across a monorepo, a duplicate dag_id is a CI-gate concern (one image per DAG).
A task’s execution.labels or execution.annotations key under the leoflow.io/ prefix → validation error. That prefix belongs to Dexaflow’s own pod metadata, which other components identify task and warm-worker pods by; use a prefix of your own (for example team.example.com/owner). A DAG version registered before this rule still runs, with those keys dropped from its pods.

The development → deploy lifecycle

flowchart LR
  I[dexaflow init] --> D[dexaflow lite<br/>hot-reload loop]
  D -->|save & iterate| D
  D --> G[git push]
  G --> CI[CI: dexaflow compile --build --push]
  CI --> REG[dexaflow push dag.json]
  REG --> PROD[(control plane<br/>immutable artifact)]

1 · Develop (fast, isolated)

dexaflow init dags/my_pipeline          # scaffold dag.py + dexaflow.yaml
dexaflow lite dags/my_pipeline           # cluster-mode: real pods on an isolated k3d
# or: dexaflow lite --executor=subprocess dags/my_pipeline   (fastest, host venv)

Open http://localhost:8088 — the UI is marked Dexaflow Lite (silver edition badge); log in with the admin password generated by dexaflow setup (or run dexaflow lite reset-password if you misplaced it). Edit dag.py/dexaflow.yaml and save; Dexaflow recompiles, re-runs the guardrails, and re-registers. A bad binding prints an error in the terminal immediately:

✗ dexaflow.yaml tasks: unknown task_id "transfrom"; the DAG defines [extract load transform]

Lite is fully isolated from Demo/Pro (own database, cluster, and ports) — no split brain. See Operating modes.

2 · Deploy (authoritative, immutable)

On git push, CI compiles + builds + pushes the artifact. The same parser, overlay, and guardrails run as a gate, so what you tested in Lite is what ships:

dexaflow compile dags/my_pipeline --image ghcr.io/org/my_pipeline:$GIT_SHA --build --push -o dag.json
dexaflow push dag.json

Without -o the artifact lands next to the project (dags/my_pipeline/dag.json), not in the directory you ran the command from. The pipelines below pass -o so the two lines agree wherever the job happens to run.

Full, copy-pasteable pipelines for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Google Cloud Build/Run, and generic runners are in CI/CD & deploy examples.

What ends up in the image

--build bakes the build context into the image, and with the default project: "." that context is your whole DAG directory. The image is pushed to a registry and pulled by every pod that runs the DAG, so anything in it is shared with everyone who can pull it.

exclude_paths in dexaflow.yaml decides what stays out. During the build it is materialized as a .dockerignore in the context — merged with your own if you have one, and removed afterwards, so the workspace is unchanged when the build ends. Your rules come first and Dexaflow’s last, which means exclude_paths has the final word: a ! re-include in your .dockerignore cannot silently defeat an exclusion you declared in dexaflow.yaml.

Each entry is written out in the forms Docker honours rather than verbatim. .dockerignore is not .gitignore: a pattern with no slash matches only at the context root, so __pycache__ alone would leave every nested one in the image. Dexaflow emits p, **/p and p/** for a bare name — the last of those is also what lets exclude_paths beat an earlier ! rule, which re-stating the plain pattern does not do.

For a dbt project, two things a host-side dbt parse leaves behind are excluded automatically, scoped to each project directory: logs/ and .user.yml. Both matter beyond image size — .user.yml is dbt’s anonymous-usage cookie identifying your machine, and it is read by the in-pod dbt, so every pod from that image reports as you; logs/dbt.log carries absolute paths from the build host.

Nothing else in a dbt project is excluded, deliberately. target/ holds the manifest dbt.manifest points at, dbt_packages/ is where dbt deps installs, and profiles.yml may be a BYO profile you point DBT_PROFILES_DIR at — each is a real input in a configuration people use, so excluding them would break working projects.

Credentials are not excluded for you either. A .env can be a legitimate input — a DAG calling load_dotenv() reads it at run time — and so can a BYO profiles.yml, so dropping either silently would break that project far from the cause. Instead the build warns:

warning: .env is in the build context and will be baked into the image, which is
pushed to a registry and pulled by every pod that runs this DAG. If it holds
credentials, add ".env" to exclude_paths in dexaflow.yaml.

Act on it or declare it deliberately; the warning stops once the file is in exclude_paths.

Last modified October 18, 2026: [release-0.5] Pick 13 v0.5.5 changes (#2010) (ad942624)