One thing I am also not quite clear on, is what the real benefit of stored_as_script is? What does it buy you that pickling doesn't?

It lets you edit the source to make code (but not structural) changes post registration without requiring re-registration. It also is more flexible than a pickled flow - a pickled representation isn't guaranteed to load in environments running with different versions of python/prefect. But we try hard not to break (without warning) the user-facing apis, so a script-based flow should be loadable across a wider range of environments.

If I may piggyback onto this question... what about

stored_as_script

in the context of docker storage?

It does make sense, changing some non-structural code without requiring registration does seem useful for debugging, as does the greater compatibility across environments. Just kinda confusing as to what all is affected when going one way or another though.

If I may piggyback onto this question... what about

stored_as_script

in the context of docker storage?

That seems less useful IMO. I could see a use case where you manually add the script files yourself in a

Dockerfile

, but that's a rare use case. We probably only added that for parity with the other storage classes.

I've always found it confusing too, thanks for your reply.

So if my flow is stored as a script, and deployed manually to N servers with prefect agent local running, is it possible to use local storage for that flow and have it work with multiple agents?

Sure, provided the script is available at that path on all machines. By default local storage also adds a hostname label marking the flow to only run on the host it was registered with. Local agents do the same. You can disable this behavior though, which you'd likely need to for the above setup:

flow.storage = Local(..., add_default_labels=False)

# and for starting the agent via cli
prefect agent local start --no-hostname-label

where the heck did I miss the add_default_lables option for local storage... I was explicitly setting the lables as None on the run_config and even that wasn't working.

it's here: https://docs.prefect.io/orchestration/flow_config/storage.html#local, but could be more apparent.

Hmm, don't see it mentioned anywhere on that page (ctrl + f)

Under "automatic labels"

Yeah, had no idea that was an argument I could pass in. Was looking all over thinking I was going crazy

github renders this weird (vuepress custom markdown), but the content is here: https://github.com/PrefectHQ/prefect/blob/master/docs/orchestration/flow_config/storage.md#local

Thank you very much for the help here!