@Marvin is there a way to export existing deployments to a yaml file?

✅ thought for 413.1 seconds

no, but there should be i think

Short answer: not directly. In Prefect 3.x there isn’t a built-in command to “export a deployment to prefect.yaml”. The server/Cloud stores the resolved deployment model, while

prefect.yaml

is a project-side config you author and version-control. Options you can use today: - Snapshot details via CLI and convert to YAML -

prefect deployment inspect

will print the deployment model as a Python dict. You can pipe it through a tiny Python one-liner to turn it into YAML:

prefect deployment inspect "flow-name/deployment-name" | python - <<'PY'
  import sys, ast, yaml
  print(yaml.safe_dump(ast.literal_eval(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=False))
  PY

Note: this gives you the server’s deployment fields, not a ready-to-run

prefect.yaml

. - Programmatically export with the Prefect client - This is a clean way to dump one or many deployments to YAML:

import asyncio, yaml
  from prefect.client.orchestration import get_client

  async def export_deployment(name: str, out_path: str):
      async with get_client() as client:
          dep = await client.read_deployment_by_name(name)  # "flow/deployment"
          data = dep.model_dump()  # pydantic model -> dict
      with open(out_path, "w") as f:
          yaml.safe_dump(data, f, sort_keys=False)

  asyncio.run(export_deployment("flow-name/deployment-name", "deployment.yaml"))

You can iterate

client.read_deployments()

similarly if you want to dump them all. Important caveat - The exported YAML above reflects the deployment object stored in Prefect, which is not the same schema as a

prefect.yaml

. If your end goal is “manage deployments as code,” you’ll want to author a

prefect.yaml

and use

prefect deploy

. See the guide: prefect.yaml in Prefect 3.x. If you share your goal (e.g., backup vs. generating a

prefect.yaml

for a repo), I can help map the fields or draft a

prefect.yaml

that mirrors your current deployment(s).