What is export command doing in apache airflow setup

Question

I am following this tutorial.
https://towardsdatascience.com/getting-started-with-apache-airflow-df1aa77d7b1b

when I run the export command as below

export AIRFLOW_HOME='pwd' airflow_home

what is this export command doing. it will create a environment variable AIRFLOW_HOME = pwd

is this the purpose? when I run the next command airflow initdb it creates a folder called pwd inside my newly created project directory and puts the files in there.

Am I missing something here?

I am using macbook, python 3.7, airflow 1.10.9

Answer 1

You're missing the correct backtick ` instead of a single quote '. On *nix systems `pwd` will be evaluated to the current directory. That's why it creates a folder called pwd instead of using the current directory as the airflow home