Prefect 2.0.1 | Scheduling Hi! 👋 I’m trying to figure out how to set up a schedule (not using the UI). Is there a way to do it within the

prefect deployment build…

command? i.e. i have something like this in a bash script:

prefect deployment build flows/dbt_flow.py:dbt_primary_flow \
--name prod_flow \
--tag dbt \
--tag prod \
--tag daily \
-sb gcs/gcs-block \
-ib kubernetes-job/k8s-block

And I’d like to add something like

--schedule "cron/0 7 * * */Europe/Berlin"

If that’s not possible I guess I have to manually edit the deployment.yaml - if that’s the case, can I just put a cron expression in there, or do I need something else? I can’t find any examples in the docs, but maybe I’m just blind? 🙃

Right now, you do need to edit it manually in the

deployment.yaml

or the GUI. Here’s how it looks in the yaml file:

schedule:
  interval: 600
  timezone: America/Chicago 

schedule:
  cron: 0 0 * * *
  timezone: America/Chicago

schedule:
  rrule: 'FREQ=WEEKLY;BYDAY=MO,WE,FR;UNTIL=20240730T040000Z'

Note that timezones are optional and RRule is only supported in the deployment YAML file, currently.

Okay, thanks @Jeff Hale, I guess the idea is to only “build” your deployment yaml once, and then update it directly as needed?

That’s the idea. 🙂

@Jeff Hale can you explain this? Every time the code changes I need to run "prefect deployment build" again to copy the new code to the storage block. And then I need to start over editing the deployment yaml, right? Am I missing something or is there a way around this?

I believe versioning for deployment.yaml files is coming very soon - probably a matter of days. Would that help?

Yes, thanks that sounds helpful. In the meantime I'll just redirect the new yamls into a temp file.

I guess an alternative is to upload the files to the storage block yourself during CI, and skip the

prefect deployment build

step all together?

Yes, not sure what the best practice is here. We have multiple flows and I think its best to build the upload into automated CI actions to be sure the flows in storage accurately reflect the current code.