Description
Description of the false positive
The CodeQL analysis is reporting a "Statement has no effect" false positive when using Apache Airflow's operator chaining syntax with >>. This is a valid and idiomatic way to declare task dependencies in Airflow DAGs, and these statements have clear side effects within the context of Airflow’s task graph construction.
Code samples or links to source code
The following is a minimal reproducible example using Apache Airflow:
from airflow import DAG
from airflow.operators.empty import EmptyOperator
from datetime import datetime
with DAG("example_dag", start_date=datetime(2025, 6, 5), schedule_interval=None) as dag:
task_1 = EmptyOperator(task_id="task_1")
task_2 = EmptyOperator(task_id="task_2")
task_3 = EmptyOperator(task_id="task_3")
task_4 = EmptyOperator(task_id="task_4")
task_1 >> task_2 # CodeQL incorrectly flags this
task_2 >> [task_3, task_4] # CodeQL incorrectly flags this too
These lines are not no-op statements; they define execution order between tasks (task_1 precedes task_2, etc.). Removing them would break DAG functionality.
URL to the alert on GitHub code scanning (optional)
Code is proprietary.
Suggested solution
If possible, please provide a way to configure CodeQL to ignore >>
operator overload on Airflow operator objects, which have intentional and important side effects.. Please note that this operator works only in DAG context manager (with DAG(...) as dag:
).
If that's not feasible, then I would greatly appreciate help setting up custom CodeQL rule to ignore this false positive.