I am new to Prefect and working my way through the docs. I noticed something weird in the

flow.storage

assignment in the file based storage discussion:

flow.storage = GitHub(
    repo="org/repo",                 # name of repo
    path="flows/my_flow.py",        # location of flow

Hi! We don’t make any assumptions about the user using source control and even if we did it’s generally pretty hacky to infer the path of the file from a call like this (we’d need to go up stack frames to inspect where

GitHub

was instantiated then figure out where the root of the git repo is then construct a relative path — all of which is quite brittle). Since we’re not storing any of your code, we need to know where the flow lives and this information is just put into the flow metadata so we know where to pull the flow from when you want to run it.

I see -- I just wanted an explanation why actually, these kind of problems often come from inherent difficulties, thanks! This stood out to me because so much of Prefect is concise and without boilerplate code. Your utility function idea is the right way, its an easy bit of boilerplate that maybe could be assumed into the storage object definition someday.

https://github.com/PrefectHQ/prefect/pull/3988 — lots of edge cases to address but it’s not unreasonable