Running Apache Airflow + Docker for Free Using GitHub Codespaces

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:22:54 +0000

While building my ETL pipeline project, I ran into a common beginner problem:

Running Apache Airflow locally on Windows with Docker was painful.

Problems included:

With only ~17GB free on my laptop, running multiple Airflow containers locally became difficult.

So I moved the entire setup to GitHub Codespaces.

Out of the box:

docker-compose up

Then:

Airflow was running in ~90 seconds.

I accidentally committed my GCP service account key once.

GitHub Secret Scanning blocked the push automatically.

Immediately added:

*.json
.env

Never commit cloud credentials.

Codespaces removes a huge amount of local environment friction and lets you focus more on:

If you'd like:

Medium: Link
Hashnode: Link

Project Repo:ETL Pipeline

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