What is Luigi?
Luigi is a Python-based execution framework developed by Spotify. It helps build data pipelines in Python and handles dependency resolution, visualization, workflow management, failures, and command line integration.
Luigi offers Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to aid developers in scheduling and monitoring sets of tasks or batch jobs. Although Luigi and Apache Airflow have similar features, they differ in usability, scalability, and calendar scheduling. Luigi helps stitch multiple tasks that might involve a Hive query, a Spark task in Scala, a Hadoop job, or a database-related task. It helps to monitor tasks, send notifications and track experiments.
How Does Luigi Help?
The Luigi pipeline library helps blend diverse processes for automation. ML projects involve orchestrating tasks and scripts. A cron job helps schedule simple pipelines, but for complex workflows with cascading failures of jobs, Luigi’s “backward” structure helps. It allows recovering failed tasks without re-running the whole pipeline.
Luigi provides a rich, interactive GUI with Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) for specifying task dependencies and sequencing tasks to run or retry. It streamlines workflow management and allows teams to focus on tasks status, sequencing, and their dependencies.
Key Features of Luigi
Powerful toolbox
Luigi provides a toolbox with several task templates useful for teams. The toolbox includes file systems abstractions for HDFS and local files reinforcing the atomicity of operations and consistent data pipelines.
Insightful visualizer
Luigi offers a web interface page that helps search, filter, and prioritize tasks. The visualizer enables a visual overview of the dependency graphs of workflows with a specification for completed and in-process tasks.
Rich infrastructure
Luigi supports complex task pipelines with a myriad of tools, utilities through a rich infrastructure, including A/B test analysis, recommendations, internal dashboards, and external reports.
Central scheduler
Luigi provides flexibility with a centralized scheduler to visualize tasks and ensure two instances of the same task are not running simultaneously.
Easy to use
Luigi is an open-source Python-based task orchestrator backed by a strong community of contributors and does not limit users with any registration barriers.
