Postgres database refusing connection from Airflow: Is the server running on host "localhost" (127.0.0.1) and accepting TCP/IP connections port 5432?

Question

I have an existing database (Postgres) that i want to connect to apache-Airflow on my host machine(Windows 10), I installed the apache-airflow on the WSL running ubuntu. The installation was smooth and working fine since i was able to get the airflow webserver running on my localhost(port:8081).

I tried connecting airflow to my existing database (carPrices) passing all the necessary parameters which were all correct. I also confirmed my database is up and running on port(5432). Whenever i click the connect button it will report this error..."could not connect to server: Connection refused Is the server running on host "localhost" (127.0.0.1) and accepting TCP/IP connections on port 5432?"

I dont know what exactly is the problem as i am new to airflow.

I tried setting the connection parameter of airflow by setting it through the airflow.cfg file and through the Airflow UI home. In the first case i cant even "airflow db init" as it report the same problem of connection refusal. the second case will setup a default sqlite db for the airflow UI to run. then i tried connecting using the UI but same error message was given.

I check using if the postgres is up and running using netstat -ab and posgres is up and listening.

I was expecting the connection to report succesful since i am sure of all the database parameters passed but instead i got this.

Answer 1

Found out the problem is with WSL 2, you cant connect to localhost from WSL2 without some complicated tweaks... The simplest thing to do is downgrade to WSL 1 running this command in powershell: wsl.exe --set-version Ubuntu-20.04 1