Annotating Task Lineage

If you're working with Airflow operators that don't have built-in OpenLineage extractors, this lets you manually annotate tasks with inlets and outlets to track data lineage. It's the fallback approach when operators lack native lineage support. You'll get table-level lineage showing what each task reads and writes, visible in Astro's lineage tab across DAGs and deployments. The approach is straightforward for simple cases, using either OpenLineage Dataset objects or Airflow Assets. Just know that if an operator already has OpenLineage methods, those take precedence. For column-level lineage or complex extraction logic, you'll need to implement custom OpenLineage methods instead.

skills.sh installs: 1K
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last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add astronomer/agents --skill annotating-task-lineage --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Annotating Task Lineage with Inlets & Outlets

This skill guides you through adding manual lineage annotations to Airflow tasks using inlets and outlets.

Reference: See the OpenLineage provider developer guide for the latest supported operators and patterns.

On Astro

Lineage annotations defined with inlets and outlets are visualized in Astro's enhanced Lineage tab, which provides cross-DAG and cross-deployment lineage views. This means your annotations are immediately visible in the Astro UI, giving you a unified view of data flow across your entire Astro organization.