Congrats on the release of 0.14.13! I am just wondering if we could use prefect build to validate the flows/tasks in our code before registering them? Or are you planing to do something like prefect validate?

What do you mean by validate? 🙂

Depends on what you mean by validate? Importing a flow should check that it's syntactically valid (but can't check that it won't have runtime errors). Other errors you might encounter during registration usually have to do with infrastructure used to host the flow (e.g. does the docker image build, can you push the source to s3, etc...). These are generally hard to check uniformly without actually doing these operations (which is why we don't support a

--dry-run

flag). So you could use

prefect build

to build your flows, and if they build properly they'll almost certainly register properly (unless there's a bug in prefect). But (depending on your flow configuration)

prefect build

may still have side effects you wouldn't want for validation alone (push a container to a registry, upload to s3, etc...).

I assume importing a flow is part of the prefect build process right? I wonder what else it does in terms of validation. (Sorry for being lazy and not reading the code)

Yep, it imports it and builds the storage object which would interact with your storage backend (ie upload the serialized flow). We don't really have any other mechanism for validation.

Got it! Thanks both you for the help!