Hey Prefect community 😎 had a question about local flow execution that I'm hoping someone can help with. Before the local prefect runner, we were previously running/debugging flows locally like this:

import os

from flows.wherever import flow

from prefect.executors import LocalDaskExecutor
from prefect.storage import Local

context = {
# ...
}

flow.executor = LocalDaskExecutor(scheduler="threads", num_workers=8)
flow.storage = Local()
state = flow.run(
    param="something"
    context=context,
)

This works fine, but doesn't seem to fly with flows that call

StartFlowRun

, since it's trying to reach out to a server. Anyone have a way to do dependent flows locally? Not sure if the new local runner can do it, I haven't had the chance to try it yet 🙂

To actually run it, some other users spin up Prefect Server for local dev purposes

Gotcha, so atm there's no easy way to do it locally without spinning up a local server?

Unfortunately not because that

StartFlowRun

code is calling the API using the Client under the hood. For unit testing, it would need to be mocked. Maybe you could mock the behavior to import the flow locally then use the

flow.run()

?

Had the same thought - I'll go down that rabbit hole for a bit, thanks!