: Manages the Airflow UI settings, such as the port it runs on and security parameters like secret keys.

: The hardcoded defaults within the Airflow source code if no other value is provided. Performance Tuning data-engineering/airflow/airflow.cfg at main - GitHub

: You can override any config setting using the format AIRFLOW__{SECTION}__{KEY} (e.g., AIRFLOW__CORE__PARALLELISM ). airflow.cfg : The settings defined in the physical file.

: Contains foundational settings like dags_folder (where Airflow scans for workflows) and executor (the mechanism that actually runs your tasks, such as SequentialExecutor or CeleryExecutor ).

While airflow.cfg is the primary configuration file, Airflow follows a specific order of precedence for settings: