How to prevent airflow from backfilling dag runs?

Question

Say you have an airflow DAG that doesn\'t make sense to backfill, meaning that, after it\'s run once, running it subsequent times quickly would be completely pointless.

Answer 1

Setting catchup=False in your dag declaration will provide this exact functionality.

I don't have the "reputation" to comment, but I wanted to say that catchup=False was designed (by me) for this exact purpose. In addition, I can verify that in 1.10.1 it is working when set explicitly in the instantiation. However I do not see it working when placed in the default args. I've been away from Airflow for 18 months though, so it will be a bit before I can take a look at why the default args isn't working for catchup.

dag = DAG('example_dag',
        max_active_runs=3,
        catchup=False,
        schedule_interval=timedelta(minutes=5),
        default_args=default_args)