Hi, can someone tell me why Prefect tries to execute the entrypoint script specified in the deployment YAML file when I run

prefect deploy

? I thought the entrypoint is just a path specification. I don't understand the reason why the code needs to be executed locally when the deployment code (including the entrypoint) is designed to be executed in a Docker container (in a Kubernetes job in my case). What is the purpose of this?

When running

pefect deploy

, the CLI tries to parse the entrypoint to do more configuration on the deployment, such as by adding a parameter schema, and configuring some metadata. The way it does that is by opening the path and loading the function defined in the entrypoint. Are you using this setup to run your flow? This setup will prevent your flow from running when it gets imported.

@flow
def my_flow():
   return 42

if __name__ == "__main__":
  my_flow()

Yes, I am using a similar setup. When I refer to 'running' or 'executing,' I mean the Prefect parsing operation. This requires me to ensure that the code is "parsable" in the environment where I execute the

prefect deploy

command. It's a bit frustrating because I have to ensure that all module imports and environment variables work correctly in the local environment. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to disable this parsing.

I see what you mean, you're right that unfortunately there's no easy way to disable that parsing. There are a few things that happen on deploy that rely on being able to parse your project file to pull out flow details. There's an assumption that you'll have the project in a runnable state from wherever you're running the deployment