Hi, I'm using Prefect v1 and I'm having trouble with configuring timeouts for

ShellTasks

. Setting timeout like it says in the documentation doesn't have any effect, the task doesn't get terminated after 10 seconds in this case. Is that a bug in Prefect or is it an issue on my part and I'm somehow misconfiguring

ShellTask

? I really appreciate any help on this and thank you in advance!

Hi @Nace Plesko -

ShellTask

seems to be behaving as expected for me on

prefect==1.2.4

from prefect import Flow
from prefect.tasks.shell import ShellTask

with Flow('test shell task timeout') as flow:
    cmds = ['sleep 4; echo "done"', 'sleep 6; echo "done"']
    
    ShellTask(timeout=5, stream_output=True).map(command=cmds)
    
if __name__ == '__main__':
    flow.run()

yields

❯ python shelltasktimeout.py
[2022-10-03 15:10:02-0500] INFO - prefect.FlowRunner | Beginning Flow run for 'test shell task timeout'
[2022-10-03 15:10:02-0500] INFO - prefect.TaskRunner | Task 'ShellTask': Starting task run...
[2022-10-03 15:10:02-0500] INFO - prefect.TaskRunner | Task 'ShellTask': Finished task run for task with final state: 'Mapped'
[2022-10-03 15:10:02-0500] INFO - prefect.TaskRunner | Task 'ShellTask[0]': Starting task run...
[2022-10-03 15:10:07-0500] INFO - prefect.ShellTask | done
[2022-10-03 15:10:07-0500] INFO - prefect.TaskRunner | Task 'ShellTask[0]': Finished task run for task with final state: 'Success'
[2022-10-03 15:10:07-0500] INFO - prefect.TaskRunner | Task 'ShellTask[1]': Starting task run...
[2022-10-03 15:10:13-0500] INFO - prefect.TaskRunner | Task 'ShellTask[1]': Finished task run for task with final state: 'TimedOut'
[2022-10-03 15:10:13-0500] INFO - prefect.FlowRunner | Flow run FAILED: some reference tasks failed.

Thanks for testing it out! Maybe it is in the version. I have

prefect==1.2.2

, but in the UI under "Flow Overview" I see

Prefect Core Version 1.3.1

hmm I checked 1.3.1 both locally and on cloud and they also appear to behave as expected for me. I wonder if my snippet behaves as expected on your machine?

Whaaat, it was about versioning!!! Huh, thank you! What happened was that we didn't have Prefect version specified in requirements.txt and I think we got then both 2.X and 1.X and that was confusing it. Cleaning up all packages and reinstalling requirements fixed it. Thank you!!

awesome - great to hear 😄

Hm, last night the scheduled runs again got stuck in running state for over 9 hours, even though I set the timeout to 7200 seconds which is 2 hours

hmm - that sounds like a different problem. If this problem persists, can you open a new thread and describe what you see there?