Installation & Configuration¶

Getting Started¶

Superset has deprecated support for Python 2.* and supports only ~=3.6 to take advantage of the newer Python features and reduce the burden of supporting previous versions. We run our test suite against 3.6, but 3.7 is fully supported as well.

Cloud-native!¶

Superset is designed to be highly available. It is “cloud-native” as it has been designed scale out in large, distributed environments, and works well inside containers. While you can easily test drive Superset on a modest setup or simply on your laptop, there’s virtually no limit around scaling out the platform. Superset is also cloud-native in the sense that it is flexible and lets you choose your web server (Gunicorn, Nginx, Apache), your metadata database engine (MySQL, Postgres, MariaDB, …), your message queue (Redis, RabbitMQ, SQS, …), your results backend (S3, Redis, Memcached, …), your caching layer (Memcached, Redis, …), works well with services like NewRelic, StatsD and DataDog, and has the ability to run analytic workloads against most popular database technologies.

Superset is battle tested in large environments with hundreds of concurrent users. Airbnb’s production environment runs inside Kubernetes and serves 600+ daily active users viewing over 100K charts a day.

The Superset web server and the Superset Celery workers (optional) are stateless, so you can scale out by running on as many servers as needed.

Start with Docker¶

Note

The Docker-related files and documentation has been community-contributed and is not actively maintained and managed by the core committers working on the project. Some issues have been reported as of 2019-01. Help and contributions around Docker are welcomed!

If you know docker, then you’re lucky, we have shortcut road for you to initialize development environment:

git clone https://github.com/apache/incubator-superset/
cd incubator-superset/contrib/docker
# prefix with SUPERSET_LOAD_EXAMPLES=yes to load examples:
docker-compose run --rm superset ./docker-init.sh
# you can run this command everytime you need to start superset now:
docker-compose up

After several minutes for superset initialization to finish, you can open a browser and view http://localhost:8088 to start your journey.

From there, the container server will reload on modification of the superset python and javascript source code. Don’t forget to reload the page to take the new frontend into account though.

See also CONTRIBUTING.md#building, for alternative way of serving the frontend.

It is also possible to run Superset in non-development mode: in the docker-compose.yml file remove the volumes needed for development and change the variable SUPERSET_ENV to production.

If you are attempting to build on a Mac and it exits with 137 you need to increase your docker resources. OSX instructions: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/#advanced (Search for memory)

Or if you’re curious and want to install superset from bottom up, then go ahead.

OS dependencies¶

Superset stores database connection information in its metadata database. For that purpose, we use the cryptography Python library to encrypt connection passwords. Unfortunately, this library has OS level dependencies.

You may want to attempt the next step (“Superset installation and initialization”) and come back to this step if you encounter an error.

Here’s how to install them:

For Debian and Ubuntu, the following command will ensure that the required dependencies are installed:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python-dev python-pip libsasl2-dev libldap2-dev

Ubuntu 18.04 If you have python3.6 installed alongside with python2.7, as is default on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, run this command also:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev python3.6-dev python-pip libsasl2-dev libldap2-dev

otherwise build for cryptography fails.

For Fedora and RHEL-derivatives, the following command will ensure that the required dependencies are installed:

sudo yum upgrade python-setuptools
sudo yum install gcc gcc-c++ libffi-devel python-devel python-pip python-wheel openssl-devel libsasl2-devel openldap-devel

Mac OS X If possible, you should upgrade to the latest version of OS X as issues are more likely to be resolved for that version. You will likely need the latest version of XCode available for your installed version of OS X. You should also install the XCode command line tools:

xcode-select --install

System python is not recommended. Homebrew’s python also ships with pip:

brew install pkg-config libffi openssl python
env LDFLAGS="-L$(brew --prefix openssl)/lib" CFLAGS="-I$(brew --prefix openssl)/include" pip install cryptography==2.4.2

Windows isn’t officially supported at this point, but if you want to attempt it, download get-pip.py, and run python get-pip.py which may need admin access. Then run the following:

C:\> pip install cryptography

# You may also have to create C:\Temp
C:\> md C:\Temp

Python virtualenv¶

It is recommended to install Superset inside a virtualenv. Python 3 already ships virtualenv. But if it’s not installed in your environment for some reason, you can install it via the package for your operating systems, otherwise you can install from pip:

pip install virtualenv

You can create and activate a virtualenv by:

# virtualenv is shipped in Python 3.6+ as venv instead of pyvenv.
# See https://docs.python.org/3.6/library/venv.html
python3 -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate

On windows the syntax for activating it is a bit different:

venv\Scripts\activate

Once you activated your virtualenv everything you are doing is confined inside the virtualenv. To exit a virtualenv just type deactivate.

Python’s setup tools and pip¶

Put all the chances on your side by getting the very latest pip and setuptools libraries.:

pip install --upgrade setuptools pip

Superset installation and initialization¶

Follow these few simple steps to install Superset.:

# Install superset
pip install apache-superset

# Initialize the database
superset db upgrade

# Create an admin user (you will be prompted to set a username, first and last name before setting a password)
$ export FLASK_APP=superset
flask fab create-admin

# Load some data to play with
superset load_examples

# Create default roles and permissions
superset init

# To start a development web server on port 8088, use -p to bind to another port
superset run -p 8088 --with-threads --reload --debugger

After installation, you should be able to point your browser to the right hostname:port http://localhost:8088, login using the credential you entered while creating the admin account, and navigate to Menu -> Admin -> Refresh Metadata. This action should bring in all of your datasources for Superset to be aware of, and they should show up in Menu -> Datasources, from where you can start playing with your data!

A proper WSGI HTTP Server¶

While you can setup Superset to run on Nginx or Apache, many use Gunicorn, preferably in async mode, which allows for impressive concurrency even and is fairly easy to install and configure. Please refer to the documentation of your preferred technology to set up this Flask WSGI application in a way that works well in your environment. Here’s an async setup known to work well in production:

gunicorn \
      -w 10 \
      -k gevent \
      --timeout 120 \
      -b  0.0.0.0:6666 \
      --limit-request-line 0 \
      --limit-request-field_size 0 \
      --statsd-host localhost:8125 \
      superset:app

Refer to the Gunicorn documentation for more information.

Note that the development web server (superset run or flask run) is not intended for production use.

If not using gunicorn, you may want to disable the use of flask-compress by setting ENABLE_FLASK_COMPRESS = False in your superset_config.py

Flask-AppBuilder Permissions¶

By default, every time the Flask-AppBuilder (FAB) app is initialized the permissions and views are added automatically to the backend and associated with the ‘Admin’ role. The issue, however, is when you are running multiple concurrent workers this creates a lot of contention and race conditions when defining permissions and views.

To alleviate this issue, the automatic updating of permissions can be disabled by setting FAB_UPDATE_PERMS = False (defaults to True).

In a production environment initialization could take on the following form:

superset init gunicorn -w 10 … superset:app

Configuration behind a load balancer¶

If you are running superset behind a load balancer or reverse proxy (e.g. NGINX or ELB on AWS), you may need to utilise a healthcheck endpoint so that your load balancer knows if your superset instance is running. This is provided at /health which will return a 200 response containing “OK” if the the webserver is running.

If the load balancer is inserting X-Forwarded-For/X-Forwarded-Proto headers, you should set ENABLE_PROXY_FIX = True in the superset config file to extract and use the headers.

In case that the reverse proxy is used for providing ssl encryption, an explicit definition of the X-Forwarded-Proto may be required. For the Apache webserver this can be set as follows:

RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto "https"

Configuration¶

To configure your application, you need to create a file (module) superset_config.py and make sure it is in your PYTHONPATH. Here are some of the parameters you can copy / paste in that configuration module:

#---------------------------------------------------------
# Superset specific config
#---------------------------------------------------------
ROW_LIMIT = 5000

SUPERSET_WEBSERVER_PORT = 8088
#---------------------------------------------------------

#---------------------------------------------------------
# Flask App Builder configuration
#---------------------------------------------------------
# Your App secret key
SECRET_KEY = '\2\1thisismyscretkey\1\2\e\y\y\h'

# The SQLAlchemy connection string to your database backend
# This connection defines the path to the database that stores your
# superset metadata (slices, connections, tables, dashboards, ...).
# Note that the connection information to connect to the datasources
# you want to explore are managed directly in the web UI
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = 'sqlite:////path/to/superset.db'

# Flask-WTF flag for CSRF
WTF_CSRF_ENABLED = True
# Add endpoints that need to be exempt from CSRF protection
WTF_CSRF_EXEMPT_LIST = []
# A CSRF token that expires in 1 year
WTF_CSRF_TIME_LIMIT = 60 * 60 * 24 * 365

# Set this API key to enable Mapbox visualizations
MAPBOX_API_KEY = ''

All the parameters and default values defined in https://github.com/apache/incubator-superset/blob/master/superset/config.py can be altered in your local superset_config.py . Administrators will want to read through the file to understand what can be configured locally as well as the default values in place.

Since superset_config.py acts as a Flask configuration module, it can be used to alter the settings Flask itself, as well as Flask extensions like flask-wtf, flask-cache, flask-migrate, and flask-appbuilder. Flask App Builder, the web framework used by Superset offers many configuration settings. Please consult the Flask App Builder Documentation for more information on how to configure it.

Make sure to change:

SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI, by default it is stored at ~/.superset/superset.db
SECRET_KEY, to a long random string

In case you need to exempt endpoints from CSRF, e.g. you are running a custom auth postback endpoint, you can add them to WTF_CSRF_EXEMPT_LIST

WTF_CSRF_EXEMPT_LIST = [‘’]

Database dependencies¶

Superset does not ship bundled with connectivity to databases, except for Sqlite, which is part of the Python standard library. You’ll need to install the required packages for the database you want to use as your metadata database as well as the packages needed to connect to the databases you want to access through Superset.

Here’s a list of some of the recommended packages.

Note that many other databases are supported, the main criteria being the existence of a functional SqlAlchemy dialect and Python driver. Googling the keyword sqlalchemy in addition of a keyword that describes the database you want to connect to should get you to the right place.

(AWS) Athena¶

The connection string for Athena looks like this

awsathena+jdbc://{aws_access_key_id}:{aws_secret_access_key}@athena.{region_name}.amazonaws.com/{schema_name}?s3_staging_dir={s3_staging_dir}&...

Where you need to escape/encode at least the s3_staging_dir, i.e.,

s3://... -> s3%3A//...

You can also use PyAthena library(no java required) like this

awsathena+rest://{aws_access_key_id}:{aws_secret_access_key}@athena.{region_name}.amazonaws.com/{schema_name}?s3_staging_dir={s3_staging_dir}&...

See PyAthena.

(Google) BigQuery¶

The connection string for BigQuery looks like this

bigquery://{project_id}

To be able to upload data, e.g. sample data, the python library pandas_gbq is required.

Snowflake¶

The connection string for Snowflake looks like this

snowflake://{user}:{password}@{account}.{region}/{database}?role={role}&warehouse={warehouse}

The schema is not necessary in the connection string, as it is defined per table/query. The role and warehouse can be omitted if defaults are defined for the user, i.e.

snowflake://{user}:{password}@{account}.{region}/{database}

Make sure the user has privileges to access and use all required databases/schemas/tables/views/warehouses, as the Snowflake SQLAlchemy engine does not test for user rights during engine creation.

See Snowflake SQLAlchemy.

Teradata¶

The connection string for Teradata looks like this

teradata://{user}:{password}@{host}

Note: Its required to have Teradata ODBC drivers installed and environment variables configured for proper work of sqlalchemy dialect. Teradata ODBC Drivers available here: https://downloads.teradata.com/download/connectivity/odbc-driver/linux

Required environment variables:

export ODBCINI=/.../teradata/client/ODBC_64/odbc.ini
export ODBCINST=/.../teradata/client/ODBC_64/odbcinst.ini

See Teradata SQLAlchemy.

Apache Drill¶

At the time of writing, the SQLAlchemy Dialect is not available on pypi and must be downloaded here: SQLAlchemy Drill

Alternatively, you can install it completely from the command line as follows:

git clone https://github.com/JohnOmernik/sqlalchemy-drill
cd sqlalchemy-drill
python3 setup.py install

Once that is done, you can connect to Drill in two ways, either via the REST interface or by JDBC. If you are connecting via JDBC, you must have the Drill JDBC Driver installed.

The basic connection string for Drill looks like this

drill+sadrill://{username}:{password}@{host}:{port}/{storage_plugin}?use_ssl=True

If you are using JDBC to connect to Drill, the connection string looks like this:

drill+jdbc://{username}:{password}@{host}:{port}/{storage_plugin}

For a complete tutorial about how to use Apache Drill with Superset, see this tutorial: Visualize Anything with Superset and Drill

Caching¶

Superset uses Flask-Cache for caching purpose. Configuring your caching backend is as easy as providing a CACHE_CONFIG, constant in your superset_config.py that complies with the Flask-Cache specifications.

Flask-Cache supports multiple caching backends (Redis, Memcached, SimpleCache (in-memory), or the local filesystem). If you are going to use Memcached please use the pylibmc client library as python-memcached does not handle storing binary data correctly. If you use Redis, please install the redis Python package:

pip install redis

For setting your timeouts, this is done in the Superset metadata and goes up the “timeout searchpath”, from your slice configuration, to your data source’s configuration, to your database’s and ultimately falls back into your global default defined in CACHE_CONFIG.

CACHE_CONFIG = {
    'CACHE_TYPE': 'redis',
    'CACHE_DEFAULT_TIMEOUT': 60 * 60 * 24, # 1 day default (in secs)
    'CACHE_KEY_PREFIX': 'superset_results',
    'CACHE_REDIS_URL': 'redis://localhost:6379/0',
}

It is also possible to pass a custom cache initialization function in the config to handle additional caching use cases. The function must return an object that is compatible with the Flask-Cache API.

from custom_caching import CustomCache

def init_cache(app):
    """Takes an app instance and returns a custom cache backend"""
    config = {
        'CACHE_DEFAULT_TIMEOUT': 60 * 60 * 24, # 1 day default (in secs)
        'CACHE_KEY_PREFIX': 'superset_results',
    }
    return CustomCache(app, config)

CACHE_CONFIG = init_cache

Superset has a Celery task that will periodically warm up the cache based on different strategies. To use it, add the following to the CELERYBEAT_SCHEDULE section in config.py:

CELERYBEAT_SCHEDULE = {
    'cache-warmup-hourly': {
        'task': 'cache-warmup',
        'schedule': crontab(minute=0, hour='*'),  # hourly
        'kwargs': {
            'strategy_name': 'top_n_dashboards',
            'top_n': 5,
            'since': '7 days ago',
        },
    },
}

This will cache all the charts in the top 5 most popular dashboards every hour. For other strategies, check the superset/tasks/cache.py file.

Deeper SQLAlchemy integration¶

It is possible to tweak the database connection information using the parameters exposed by SQLAlchemy. In the Database edit view, you will find an extra field as a JSON blob.

This JSON string contains extra configuration elements. The engine_params object gets unpacked into the sqlalchemy.create_engine call, while the metadata_params get unpacked into the sqlalchemy.MetaData call. Refer to the SQLAlchemy docs for more information.

Note

If your using CTAS on SQLLab and PostgreSQL take a look at Create Table As (CTAS) for specific engine_params.

Schemas (Postgres & Redshift)¶

Postgres and Redshift, as well as other databases, use the concept of schema as a logical entity on top of the database. For Superset to connect to a specific schema, there’s a schema parameter you can set in the table form.

External Password store for SQLAlchemy connections¶

It is possible to use an external store for you database passwords. This is useful if you a running a custom secret distribution framework and do not wish to store secrets in Superset’s meta database.

Example: Write a function that takes a single argument of type sqla.engine.url and returns the password for the given connection string. Then set SQLALCHEMY_CUSTOM_PASSWORD_STORE in your config file to point to that function.

def example_lookup_password(url):
    secret = <<get password from external framework>>
    return 'secret'

SQLALCHEMY_CUSTOM_PASSWORD_STORE = example_lookup_password

A common pattern is to use environment variables to make secrets available. SQLALCHEMY_CUSTOM_PASSWORD_STORE can also be used for that purpose.

def example_password_as_env_var(url):
    # assuming the uri looks like
    # mysql://localhost?superset_user:{SUPERSET_PASSWORD}
    return url.password.format(os.environ)

SQLALCHEMY_CUSTOM_PASSWORD_STORE = example_password_as_env_var

SSL Access to databases¶

This example worked with a MySQL database that requires SSL. The configuration may differ with other backends. This is what was put in the extra parameter

{
    "metadata_params": {},
    "engine_params": {
          "connect_args":{
              "sslmode":"require",
              "sslrootcert": "/path/to/my/pem"
        }
     }
}

Druid¶

From the UI, enter the information about your clusters in the Sources -> Druid Clusters menu by hitting the + sign.
Once the Druid cluster connection information is entered, hit the Sources -> Refresh Druid Metadata menu item to populate
Navigate to your datasources

Note that you can run the superset refresh_druid command to refresh the metadata from your Druid cluster(s)

Presto¶

By default Superset assumes the most recent version of Presto is being used when querying the datasource. If you’re using an older version of presto, you can configure it in the extra parameter:

{
    "version": "0.123"
}

Exasol¶

The connection string for Exasol looks like this

exa+pyodbc://{user}:{password}@{host}

Note: It’s required to have Exasol ODBC drivers installed for the sqlalchemy dialect to work properly. Exasol ODBC Drivers available are here: https://www.exasol.com/portal/display/DOWNLOAD/Exasol+Download+Section

Example config (odbcinst.ini can be left empty)

$ cat $/.../path/to/odbc.ini
[EXAODBC]
DRIVER = /.../path/to/driver/EXASOL_driver.so
EXAHOST = host:8563
EXASCHEMA = main

See SQLAlchemy for Exasol.

CORS¶

The extra CORS Dependency must be installed:

superset[cors]

The following keys in superset_config.py can be specified to configure CORS:

ENABLE_CORS: Must be set to True in order to enable CORS
CORS_OPTIONS: options passed to Flask-CORS (documentation <https://flask-cors.corydolphin.com/en/latest/api.html#extension>)

DOMAIN SHARDING¶

Chrome allows up to 6 open connections per domain at a time. When there are more than 6 slices in dashboard, a lot of time fetch requests are queued up and wait for next available socket. PR 5039 adds domain sharding to Superset, and this feature will be enabled by configuration only (by default Superset doesn’t allow cross-domain request).

SUPERSET_WEBSERVER_DOMAINS: list of allowed hostnames for domain sharding feature. default None

MIDDLEWARE¶

Superset allows you to add your own middleware. To add your own middleware, update the ADDITIONAL_MIDDLEWARE key in your superset_config.py. ADDITIONAL_MIDDLEWARE should be a list of your additional middleware classes.

For example, to use AUTH_REMOTE_USER from behind a proxy server like nginx, you have to add a simple middleware class to add the value of HTTP_X_PROXY_REMOTE_USER (or any other custom header from the proxy) to Gunicorn’s REMOTE_USER environment variable:

class RemoteUserMiddleware(object):
    def __init__(self, app):
        self.app = app
    def __call__(self, environ, start_response):
        user = environ.pop('HTTP_X_PROXY_REMOTE_USER', None)
        environ['REMOTE_USER'] = user
        return self.app(environ, start_response)

ADDITIONAL_MIDDLEWARE = [RemoteUserMiddleware, ]

Adapted from http://flask.pocoo.org/snippets/69/

Event Logging¶

Superset by default logs special action event on it’s database. These log can be accessed on the UI navigating to “Security” -> “Action Log”. You can freely customize these logs by implementing your own event log class.

Example of a simple JSON to Stdout class:

class JSONStdOutEventLogger(AbstractEventLogger):

    def log(self, user_id, action, *args, **kwargs):
        records = kwargs.get('records', list())
        dashboard_id = kwargs.get('dashboard_id')
        slice_id = kwargs.get('slice_id')
        duration_ms = kwargs.get('duration_ms')
        referrer = kwargs.get('referrer')

        for record in records:
            log = dict(
                action=action,
                json=record,
                dashboard_id=dashboard_id,
                slice_id=slice_id,
                duration_ms=duration_ms,
                referrer=referrer,
                user_id=user_id
            )
            print(json.dumps(log))

Then on Superset’s config pass an instance of the logger type you want to use.

EVENT_LOGGER = JSONStdOutEventLogger()

Upgrading¶

Upgrading should be as straightforward as running:

pip install apache-superset --upgrade
superset db upgrade
superset init

We recommend to follow standard best practices when upgrading Superset, such as taking a database backup prior to the upgrade, upgrading a staging environment prior to upgrading production, and upgrading production while less users are active on the platform.

Note

Some upgrades may contain backward-incompatible changes, or require scheduling downtime, when that is the case, contributors attach notes in UPDATING.md in the repository. It’s recommended to review this file prior to running an upgrade.

Celery Tasks¶

On large analytic databases, it’s common to run queries that execute for minutes or hours. To enable support for long running queries that execute beyond the typical web request’s timeout (30-60 seconds), it is necessary to configure an asynchronous backend for Superset which consists of:

one or many Superset workers (which is implemented as a Celery worker), and can be started with the celery worker command, run celery worker --help to view the related options.
a celery broker (message queue) for which we recommend using Redis or RabbitMQ
a results backend that defines where the worker will persist the query results

Configuring Celery requires defining a CELERY_CONFIG in your superset_config.py. Both the worker and web server processes should have the same configuration.

class CeleryConfig(object):
    BROKER_URL = 'redis://localhost:6379/0'
    CELERY_IMPORTS = (
        'superset.sql_lab',
        'superset.tasks',
    )
    CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = 'redis://localhost:6379/0'
    CELERYD_LOG_LEVEL = 'DEBUG'
    CELERYD_PREFETCH_MULTIPLIER = 10
    CELERY_ACKS_LATE = True
    CELERY_ANNOTATIONS = {
        'sql_lab.get_sql_results': {
            'rate_limit': '100/s',
        },
        'email_reports.send': {
            'rate_limit': '1/s',
            'time_limit': 120,
            'soft_time_limit': 150,
            'ignore_result': True,
        },
    }
    CELERYBEAT_SCHEDULE = {
        'email_reports.schedule_hourly': {
            'task': 'email_reports.schedule_hourly',
            'schedule': crontab(minute=1, hour='*'),
        },
    }

CELERY_CONFIG = CeleryConfig

To start a Celery worker to leverage the configuration run:

celery worker --app=superset.tasks.celery_app:app --pool=prefork -O fair -c 4

To start a job which schedules periodic background jobs, run
```
celery beat --app=superset.tasks.celery_app:app
```

To setup a result backend, you need to pass an instance of a derivative of werkzeug.contrib.cache.BaseCache to the RESULTS_BACKEND configuration key in your superset_config.py. It’s possible to use Memcached, Redis, S3 (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/s3werkzeugcache), memory or the file system (in a single server-type setup or for testing), or to write your own caching interface. Your superset_config.py may look something like:

# On S3
from s3cache.s3cache import S3Cache
S3_CACHE_BUCKET = 'foobar-superset'
S3_CACHE_KEY_PREFIX = 'sql_lab_result'
RESULTS_BACKEND = S3Cache(S3_CACHE_BUCKET, S3_CACHE_KEY_PREFIX)

# On Redis
from werkzeug.contrib.cache import RedisCache
RESULTS_BACKEND = RedisCache(
    host='localhost', port=6379, key_prefix='superset_results')

For performance gains, MessagePack and PyArrow are now used for results serialization. This can be disabled by setting RESULTS_BACKEND_USE_MSGPACK = False in your configuration, should any issues arise. Please clear your existing results cache store when upgrading an existing environment.

Important notes

It is important that all the worker nodes and web servers in the Superset cluster share a common metadata database. This means that SQLite will not work in this context since it has limited support for concurrency and typically lives on the local file system.
There should only be one instance of celery beat running in your entire setup. If not, background jobs can get scheduled multiple times resulting in weird behaviors like duplicate delivery of reports, higher than expected load / traffic etc.
SQL Lab will only run your queries asynchronously if you enable “Asynchronous Query Execution” in your database settings.

Email Reports¶

Email reports allow users to schedule email reports for

slice and dashboard visualization (Attachment or inline)
slice data (CSV attachment on inline table)

Schedules are defined in crontab format and each schedule can have a list of recipients (all of them can receive a single mail, or separate mails). For audit purposes, all outgoing mails can have a mandatory bcc.

Requirements

A selenium compatible driver & headless browser
- geckodriver and Firefox is preferred
- chromedriver is a good option too

Run celery worker and celery beat as follows

celery worker --app=superset.tasks.celery_app:app --pool=prefork -Ofair -c 4
celery beat --app=superset.tasks.celery_app:app

Important notes

Be mindful of the concurrency setting for celery (using -c 4). Selenium/webdriver instances can consume a lot of CPU / memory on your servers.
In some cases, if you notice a lot of leaked geckodriver processes, try running your celery processes with
```
celery worker --pool=prefork --max-tasks-per-child=128 ...
```
It is recommended to run separate workers for sql_lab and email_reports tasks. Can be done by using queue field in CELERY_ANNOTATIONS

SQL Lab¶

SQL Lab is a powerful SQL IDE that works with all SQLAlchemy compatible databases. By default, queries are executed in the scope of a web request so they may eventually timeout as queries exceed the maximum duration of a web request in your environment, whether it’d be a reverse proxy or the Superset server itself. In such cases, it is preferred to use celery to run the queries in the background. Please follow the examples/notes mentioned above to get your celery setup working.

Also note that SQL Lab supports Jinja templating in queries and that it’s possible to overload the default Jinja context in your environment by defining the JINJA_CONTEXT_ADDONS in your superset configuration. Objects referenced in this dictionary are made available for users to use in their SQL.

JINJA_CONTEXT_ADDONS = {
    'my_crazy_macro': lambda x: x*2,
}

SQL Lab also includes a live query validation feature with pluggable backends. You can configure which validation implementation is used with which database engine by adding a block like the following to your config.py:

FEATURE_FLAGS = {
    'SQL_VALIDATORS_BY_ENGINE': {
        'presto': 'PrestoDBSQLValidator',
    }
}

The available validators and names can be found in sql_validators/.

Scheduling queries

You can optionally allow your users to schedule queries directly in SQL Lab. This is done by addding extra metadata to saved queries, which are then picked up by an external scheduled (like [Apache Airflow](https://airflow.apache.org/)).

To allow scheduled queries, add the following to your config.py:

FEATURE_FLAGS = {
    # Configuration for scheduling queries from SQL Lab. This information is
    # collected when the user clicks "Schedule query", and saved into the `extra`
    # field of saved queries.
    # See: https://github.com/mozilla-services/react-jsonschema-form
    'SCHEDULED_QUERIES': {
        'JSONSCHEMA': {
            'title': 'Schedule',
            'description': (
                'In order to schedule a query, you need to specify when it '
                'should start running, when it should stop running, and how '
                'often it should run. You can also optionally specify '
                'dependencies that should be met before the query is '
                'executed. Please read the documentation for best practices '
                'and more information on how to specify dependencies.'
            ),
            'type': 'object',
            'properties': {
                'output_table': {
                    'type': 'string',
                    'title': 'Output table name',
                },
                'start_date': {
                    'type': 'string',
                    'title': 'Start date',
                    # date-time is parsed using the chrono library, see
                    # https://www.npmjs.com/package/chrono-node#usage
                    'format': 'date-time',
                    'default': 'tomorrow at 9am',
                },
                'end_date': {
                    'type': 'string',
                    'title': 'End date',
                    # date-time is parsed using the chrono library, see
                    # https://www.npmjs.com/package/chrono-node#usage
                    'format': 'date-time',
                    'default': '9am in 30 days',
                },
                'schedule_interval': {
                    'type': 'string',
                    'title': 'Schedule interval',
                },
                'dependencies': {
                    'type': 'array',
                    'title': 'Dependencies',
                    'items': {
                        'type': 'string',
                    },
                },
            },
        },
        'UISCHEMA': {
            'schedule_interval': {
                'ui:placeholder': '@daily, @weekly, etc.',
            },
            'dependencies': {
                'ui:help': (
                    'Check the documentation for the correct format when '
                    'defining dependencies.'
                ),
            },
        },
        'VALIDATION': [
            # ensure that start_date <= end_date
            {
                'name': 'less_equal',
                'arguments': ['start_date', 'end_date'],
                'message': 'End date cannot be before start date',
                # this is where the error message is shown
                'container': 'end_date',
            },
        ],
        # link to the scheduler; this example links to an Airflow pipeline
        # that uses the query id and the output table as its name
        'linkback': (
            'https://airflow.example.com/admin/airflow/tree?'
            'dag_id=query_${id}_${extra_json.schedule_info.output_table}'
        ),
    },
}

This feature flag is based on [react-jsonschema-form](https://github.com/mozilla-services/react-jsonschema-form), and will add a button called “Schedule Query” to SQL Lab. When the button is clicked, a modal will show up where the user can add the metadata required for scheduling the query.

This information can then be retrieved from the endpoint /savedqueryviewapi/api/read and used to schedule the queries that have scheduled_queries in their JSON metadata. For schedulers other than Airflow, additional fields can be easily added to the configuration file above.

Celery Flower¶

Flower is a web based tool for monitoring the Celery cluster which you can install from pip:

pip install flower

and run via:

celery flower --app=superset.tasks.celery_app:app

Building from source¶

More advanced users may want to build Superset from sources. That would be the case if you fork the project to add features specific to your environment. See CONTRIBUTING.md#setup-local-environment-for-development.

Blueprints¶

Blueprints are Flask’s reusable apps. Superset allows you to specify an array of Blueprints in your superset_config module. Here’s an example of how this can work with a simple Blueprint. By doing so, you can expect Superset to serve a page that says “OK” at the /simple_page url. This can allow you to run other things such as custom data visualization applications alongside Superset, on the same server.

from flask import Blueprint
simple_page = Blueprint('simple_page', __name__,
                                template_folder='templates')
@simple_page.route('/', defaults={'page': 'index'})
@simple_page.route('/<page>')
def show(page):
    return "Ok"

BLUEPRINTS = [simple_page]

StatsD logging¶

Superset is instrumented to log events to StatsD if desired. Most endpoints hit are logged as well as key events like query start and end in SQL Lab.

To setup StatsD logging, it’s a matter of configuring the logger in your superset_config.py.

from superset.stats_logger import StatsdStatsLogger
STATS_LOGGER = StatsdStatsLogger(host='localhost', port=8125, prefix='superset')

Note that it’s also possible to implement you own logger by deriving superset.stats_logger.BaseStatsLogger.

Install Superset with helm in Kubernetes¶

You can install Superset into Kubernetes with Helm <https://helm.sh/>. The chart is located in install/helm.

To install Superset into your Kubernetes:

helm upgrade --install superset ./install/helm/superset

Note that the above command will install Superset into default namespace of your Kubernetes cluster.

Custom OAuth2 configuration¶

Beyond FAB supported providers (github, twitter, linkedin, google, azure), its easy to connect Superset with other OAuth2 Authorization Server implementations that support “code” authorization.

The first step: Configure authorization in Superset superset_config.py.

AUTH_TYPE = AUTH_OAUTH
OAUTH_PROVIDERS = [
    {   'name':'egaSSO',
        'token_key':'access_token', # Name of the token in the response of access_token_url
        'icon':'fa-address-card',   # Icon for the provider
        'remote_app': {
            'consumer_key':'myClientId',  # Client Id (Identify Superset application)
            'consumer_secret':'MySecret', # Secret for this Client Id (Identify Superset application)
            'request_token_params':{
                'scope': 'read'               # Scope for the Authorization
            },
            'access_token_method':'POST',    # HTTP Method to call access_token_url
            'access_token_params':{        # Additional parameters for calls to access_token_url
                'client_id':'myClientId'
            },
            'access_token_headers':{    # Additional headers for calls to access_token_url
                'Authorization': 'Basic Base64EncodedClientIdAndSecret'
            },
            'base_url':'https://myAuthorizationServer/oauth2AuthorizationServer/',
            'access_token_url':'https://myAuthorizationServer/oauth2AuthorizationServer/token',
            'authorize_url':'https://myAuthorizationServer/oauth2AuthorizationServer/authorize'
        }
    }
]

# Will allow user self registration, allowing to create Flask users from Authorized User
AUTH_USER_REGISTRATION = True

# The default user self registration role
AUTH_USER_REGISTRATION_ROLE = "Public"

Second step: Create a CustomSsoSecurityManager that extends SupersetSecurityManager and overrides oauth_user_info:

from superset.security import SupersetSecurityManager

class CustomSsoSecurityManager(SupersetSecurityManager):

    def oauth_user_info(self, provider, response=None):
        logging.debug("Oauth2 provider: {0}.".format(provider))
        if provider == 'egaSSO':
            # As example, this line request a GET to base_url + '/' + userDetails with Bearer  Authentication,
    # and expects that authorization server checks the token, and response with user details
            me = self.appbuilder.sm.oauth_remotes[provider].get('userDetails').data
            logging.debug("user_data: {0}".format(me))
            return { 'name' : me['name'], 'email' : me['email'], 'id' : me['user_name'], 'username' : me['user_name'], 'first_name':'', 'last_name':''}
    ...

This file must be located at the same directory than superset_config.py with the name custom_sso_security_manager.py.

Then we can add this two lines to superset_config.py:

from custom_sso_security_manager import CustomSsoSecurityManager
CUSTOM_SECURITY_MANAGER = CustomSsoSecurityManager

Feature Flags¶

Because of a wide variety of users, Superset has some features that are not enabled by default. For example, some users have stronger security restrictions, while some others may not. So Superset allow users to enable or disable some features by config. For feature owners, you can add optional functionalities in Superset, but will be only affected by a subset of users.

You can enable or disable features with flag from superset_config.py:

DEFAULT_FEATURE_FLAGS = {
    'CLIENT_CACHE': False,
    'ENABLE_EXPLORE_JSON_CSRF_PROTECTION': False,
    'PRESTO_EXPAND_DATA': False,
}

Here is a list of flags and descriptions:

ENABLE_EXPLORE_JSON_CSRF_PROTECTION
- For some security concerns, you may need to enforce CSRF protection on all query request to explore_json endpoint. In Superset, we use flask-csrf add csrf protection for all POST requests, but this protection doesn’t apply to GET method.
- When ENABLE_EXPLORE_JSON_CSRF_PROTECTION is set to true, your users cannot make GET request to explore_json. The default value for this feature False (current behavior), explore_json accepts both GET and POST request. See PR 7935 for more details.
PRESTO_EXPAND_DATA
- When this feature is enabled, nested types in Presto will be expanded into extra columns and/or arrays. This is experimental, and doesn’t work with all nested types.