Introducing airport-go — Go package for easy DuckDB Airport-compatible Arrow Flight services

[VGSML]

Hi @rustyconover, everyone,

I’d like to share airport-go, an open-source Go package for building Apache Arrow Flight servers compatible with the DuckDB Airport Extension:
https://github.com/hugr-lab/airport-go

airport-go provides a high-level, ergonomic API for implementing Airport-compatible backends without embedding DuckDB. Key features include:
• Simple API — build a Flight server in under 30 lines of Go
• Fluent Catalog Builder for schemas, tables, and functions
• Dynamic catalogs with support for CREATE/DROP/ALTER operations
• Bearer token authentication
• Efficient streaming (no rebatching, preserves Arrow batch sizes)
• Context-aware cancellation
• Native gRPC integration (register on your own server, manage TLS/lifecycle)

The repository contains complete examples for:
• basic servers
• authenticated servers
• dynamic catalogs
• DDL operations (CREATE/DROP/ALTER)
• DML operations (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE)

Future plans:
• Structured helpers for filter pushdown (predicate pushdown) to simplify parsing and applying pushed filters from DuckDB.

If you want to build Airport-compatible systems or experimenting with Arrow Flight backends on Go, the package may be useful. Feedback is welcome.

Thanks!

[rustyconover]

@VGSML thanks for creating this! If there are more places I can promote it please let me know.

[VGSML]

Thanks a lot, and thank you for the great idea and the Airport extension itself. It’s a genuinely impressive concept, and the whole query.farm project is very inspiring.

I’m planning to publish an overview post on LinkedIn and a Medium article soon, covering the main use cases and the value Airport brings to the ecosystem.

I would also appreciate a star on the repository if the project proves useful.

I developed airport-go as part of another open-source project - Hugr (https://hugr-lab.github.io).
Hugr is an open-source Data Mesh platform and high-performance GraphQL backend that exposes distributed data sources through a unified GraphQL API and uses DuckDB under the hood for fast analytics, geospatial workflows, and portable query execution.

A star on the main Hugr repository would also be appreciated:
https://github.com/hugr-lab/hugr

Thanks again for the support!

[rustyconover]

@VGSML I'd be happy to link to this in the main Airport docs, if you like to prepare a PR to

https://github.com/Query-farm/airport-docs

I'd be happy to post it.

[VGSML]

O, super! I already have the api_guide.md in the repo. So we should decide where in the doc index it should be placed - Guides/airport-compatible service on Go?

[rustyconover]

Sure just take a guess and I'll confirm it when you send the PR.