Hi! Silly question: I have a somewhat flaky task that fails sometimes, so I wrapped the function in

@task(max_retries=10, retry_delay=timedelta(minutes=5))

. But the failure is “silent”, in that it’s wrapped by a lower-level library. I know how to check whether it’s failed, so how should I tell Prefect that the task failed (and retry?) — is it enough to

raise prefect.engine.signals.FAIL

? Or does it need to be an explicit

raise ValueError

or something?

Hey @Danny Vilela -- either raising a failure signal or throwing an exception should do it

@Zanie awesome — thank you!

Ah I think if you raise the RETRY signal manually, you are overriding the retry logic attached to the task. I'm actually not sure what would happen if you mixed them both.

Ah gotcha — no worries! I’ll stick with

FAIL

for now. Thanks again Michael 🙏

Generally, I'd try not to raise Prefect signals unless you have to

Ahhhhh so sorry, whenever you’re free: Prefect prefers we raise an exception rather than raise the signal ourselves? Is there a particular reason?

I think what Michael is saying that ideally the retry logic should be handled for you, rather than explicitly raising the signals. If there is an error, Prefect will handle those for you.

Ah, that makes sense! Thanks Kevin