Hi All - hopefully an easy question: What is the proper way to redefine an existing task? E.g., In interactive mode I create my_task, then edit my_task, and I get an error of "OSError: could not get source code". Using 2.6.4

Did you build the deployment after making changes to your task?

I rebuilt the flow the task was running in before calling the flow (editing/redefining the flow instead of the task presents the same error), but I haven't created an actual deployment of the flow - I have just been testing the functionality in an interactive python session

Do you get the same error by calling the task directly i.e

my_task()

?

the error is when just defining the task, not actually trying to call it

Is this using ipython?

just standard shell interpreter

This happens in interactive mode because when you create a new flow or task with the same name as an existing flow or task, Prefect tries to load the file where the redefinition happened so it can give you a friendly warning message. But, of course, that doesn't work if your code isn't in a file 🙂 Normally, you wouldn't need to redefine an existing task because there's usually a better way to accomplish your goals. But if you just want to do a few quick experiments in an interactive session, I can see why redefining and re-running tasks would be handy. A quick way to work around this would be giving the tasks different names so Prefect doesn't see the redefinition as a duplicate. In that case, your sample would look like:

@task(name="1")
def my_task():
    print("hello")

@task(name="2")
def my_task():
    print("hello")

# Prefect remains happy

If you want to get really creative, you could run something like this at the beginning of your interactive Python session:

import uuid
from prefect import task as _task
task = lambda fn, **kwargs: _task(fn, name=str(uuid.uuid4()), **kwargs)

# then, these should work
@task
def my_task():
    print("hello")

@task
def my_task():
    print("hello")

# Prefect still happy

Disclaimer: you should definitely not do anything like that in production code. But if you just want a quick way to redefine a task a couple of dozen times when you're experimenting in a Python REPL, it should be okay.