Is there any way to achieve something like

prefect register --dry-run

? I would like to add a CI step that ensures that we won’t fail after a merge when we try to register flows in CD

could you explain the problem a bit more? in 2.0 you can achieve that using "build" CLI only to generate a YAML manifest without "apply" step

I see! Ok, so no way to do with 1.x. We're considering moving to Prefect 2 - keeping an eye out as the ga continues! The problem we run into is that sometimes we merge code into

main

which kicks off flow registration via our CD, which then breaks. There is no simple way to fully confirm "this flow will successfully register" without actually registering it. Obviously unit tests etc... will catch some classes of errors, but not foolproof. Where as if there was something like

register --dry-run

we could run it in the same environment as part of CI so that when we run

register

as part of CD we are sure that it will work (from a code perspective at least). It does sounds like 2.x fixes it. Thank you for the response!!

if I understood the problem correctly, what might be a helpful approach would be having the same CI/CD workflow in dev branch pointing to Prefect 2.0 dev workspace and registering from there. If everything worked, it means the code works and is ready for prod. The PREFECT_API_URL in the main branch can point to the prod workspace. I definitely understand the problem here and I believe that with 2.0 you can solve it quite elegantly, especially with multiple Git branches and workspaces

🤔 good point. we could just keep actually registering flows to a ~dummy workspace during CI runs