Hi all 👋 prefect duck Working on having our Flows automatically re-registered when there are changes with `1.1.0`'s

--watch

flag. However, as we’re spinning it all up with docker-compose, and we have multiple Prefect Projects, so I want to run a few of these

prefect register

commands in the container’s entrypoint shell script (code example in 🧵) Is there an easy way to: • either run the

prefect register

command in background, so it lets the rest run • or, run

prefect register

with specifying the project in the Flow script, so we’d need to run the command only once for all projects

Thanks for sharing your approach. Usually, the

prefect register

command is invoked either: • manually by the users when they want to register a new flow or a new version of an already existing flow • automatically by CI upon merge This is actually the first time I see someone using the --watch flag in the flow registration process. Perhaps you could give a CI/CD pipeline a try? This would be easier to set up than a service watching code changes

Thanks for the pointer @Anna Geller 🙌 This

--watch

flag got me really excited when I saw it be one of the features of the newer versions - exactly because I didn’t want to keep manually going into instances, exec-ing into the docker containers, and running

python3 run-dbt-flow.py

Now, we’re working with a CI/CD pipeline, indeed - I was just curious whether there was a fancier way that this flag can achieve the same, rather then putting a

docker exec -d prefect_agent bash -c "prefect register ……"

in the pipeline 😅

Yeah, this is also an interesting approach! There is definitely no right or wrong here. But somehow I think (it's really just my opinion) that running a persistent service watching for changes to the flow code could be costly (you'd need to run it as a service 24/7). Given that tools such as GitHub Actions or CircleCI are already watching changes pushed and merged to your repository, setting this via a CI/CD pipeline invoked upon merge to the main/master branch could be much simpler and less expensive.

That’s a fair point 😛 It’s a shame such a nice flag won’t be put to use yet :(( Thanks for your help 🙏 cc @Gabriel Kalunga

Just to clarify: regarding your point "It’s a shame such a nice flag won’t be put to use yet :((" - you can totally use it! The question is whether you want to use it as an alternative to registering from CI/CD.

completely understood - exactly that 👉 I’m just not keen (atm) to go through the hassle of working that part out, when there’s a known solution to it through CI/CD 😄