What's new for developers using Astro: IDE, VS Code, and a first look at what's next
4 min read |
If you’re an Astronomer customer who authors Dags, we’ve spent the last year making it easier for you to code in more places, whether that’s in your browser, locally in your editor, or even via Claude Code and Codex. Today we're rounding up three milestones in that effort: one that’s been in use for a while, one that came out today, and one that we're just starting to tease.
Out of preview: the Astro IDE is now generally available
The Astro IDE is our browser-based environment for writing, testing, and deploying Dags without any local setup, and it's officially GA as of this week.
Since launching in Labs a year ago, we've seen close to 7,000 projects created across roughly 2,300 active organizations. A steadily growing number of teams are now writing Dags on our IDE, and we’re confident in its ability to provide a meaningful and useful alternative to local development.
If you haven’t tried the IDE yet, it’s worth checking out. You’ll be able to import projects from any git provider, use Otto to explain, draft, upgrade or modify code, and test your Dags against ephemeral (or existing) Deployments with just one click. When you’re happy with the code, you can deploy to Astro or commit to git. We’ve found that teams who adopt the IDE see significant reductions in onboarding time for new engineers and up to 10x faster Dag delivery from concept to production.
A couple of elements within the IDE are still evolving and staying in Labs for now, including our visual Dag builder Blueprint, and Otto, our data engineering agent.
Brand new: Astro for VS Code and Cursor
Aside from the IDE, a lot of our customers are working in VS Code or Cursor instead. So, we're bringing Astro to you there too.
Today we published the Astro extension for VS Code to bring the full local Airflow development loop into your editor. Next week, we’ll be publishing the same extension for Cursor, available via the Cursor marketplace.
Here’s what’s in the first release of these extensions:
- See what's broken without leaving the editor. Browse your Deployments with health checks at a glance, then expand one to see its import errors and failed Dag runs, scoped to the deployment they came from.
- Bring Otto into your workflow. Otto has its own panel. Use Otto for your Airflow and Astro work, and whatever agent you like for everything else. You can send a failed Dag run or import error straight to Otto without copy-pasting stack traces into a chat box.
- Run Airflow locally. Start and stop local Airflow with or without Docker, access logs and open the local Airflow UI.
- Operate hibernated Deployments. Wake up a sleeping development Deployment without leaving the editor, overriding its hibernation schedule.
- Support for Airflow 2 and 3 and upgrades with Otto. Airflow 2 Deployments also show their support deadline, with an offer to plan the upgrade with Otto.
- Docs where you are. Search Astronomer and Airflow docs for your version and read them right in the editor.
The VS Code extension is available here, and Cursor will be available next week. If you have any questions or feedback, you can leave it with us by opening an issue on GitHub.
On the horizon: one CLI for both engineers and agents
Looking further out, we're rethinking the Astro CLI itself. The browser and the editor aren't the whole picture. The terminal is where a lot of agents already do their work, and it's the surface we're rebuilding next.
There are a few changes we’re considering. Firstly, we’re bringing the Astro project up to the standard of the rest of the Python ecosystem. Today, what makes a folder an Astro project is spread across a Dockerfile tag, requirements.txt, packages.txt, .astro/config.yaml and airflow_settings.yaml. We’re working on improvements that will centralise all of this configuration in one pyproject.toml.
We also believe the future must be friendly to agents. Our new experience will have improvements that make the Astro CLI easier for agents to work with, while still providing an excellent user experience for data engineers. More on this soon.
Whenever and wherever you’re writing code for Airflow, we’re here to help. Check out the browser-based Astro IDE, or install the VS Code extension today.
