How-to Guides

Excalibur’s architecture is heavily inspired from Airflow, so you may experience déjà vu while reading this page of the documentation. Airflow LICENSE.

Setting Configuration Options

The first time you run Excalibur, it will create a file called excalibur.cfg in your $EXCALIBUR_HOME directory (~/excalibur by default). This file contains Excalibur’s configuration and you can edit it to change any of the settings.

For example, the metadata database connection string can be set in excalibur.cfg like this:

[core]
sql_alchemy_conn = my_conn_string

Resetting the Metadata Database

Warning

The following command will wipe your Excalibur metadata database, removing all information about uploaded files, saved settings and finished/in-progress jobs.

You can reset the metadata database using:

$ excalibur resetdb

Using the MySQL Database Backend

Excalibur uses SqlAlchemy to connect to a database backend. By default, a sqlite database is used. To use MySQL, you need to first install MySQL and then create a database and a user.

Installing MySQL

To use the MySQL database backend, you need to install Excalibur using:

$ pip install excalibur-py[mysql]

You can install MySQL using your system’s package manager. For Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev

And then set it up using:

$ sudo mysql_secure_installation

Setup

Now you can create the a database and a user for Excalibur:

> CREATE DATABASE excalibur CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
> GRANT ALL ON excalibur.* TO 'excalibur'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '1234';

Finally, you need to change the sql_alchemy_conn in excalibur.cfg to:

[core]
sql_alchemy_conn = mysql://excalibur:1234@localhost:3306/excalibur

And initialize the metadata database using:

$ excalibur initdb

Scaling Out with Celery

CeleryExecutor is one of the ways you can scale out the number of workers. For this to work, you need to setup a Celery backend (RabbitMQ, Redis, …) and change your excalibur.cfg to point the executor parameter to CeleryExecutor and provide the related Celery settings.

For more information about setting up a Celery broker, refer to the exhaustive Celery documentation on the topic.

To kick off a worker, you need to setup Excalibur and kick off the worker subcommand:

$ excalibur worker

Your worker should start picking up tasks as soon as they get fired in its direction.