airflow needs a home, ~/airflow is the default,

but you can lay foundation somewhere else if you prefer

(optional)

export AIRFLOW_HOME=~/airflow

install from pypi using pip

pip install apache-airflow

initialize the database

airflow initdb

start the web server, default port is 8080

airflow webserver -p 8080

start the scheduler

airflow scheduler

create an admin user

airflow users create \
--username admin \
--firstname Peter \
--lastname Parker \
--role Admin \
--email spiderman@superhero.org