Incremental Flow registration

[gatesn]

Suppose a Python repository that defines many flows, what's the recommended way to incrementally register them only when they've changed?

In other words, how should I setup an idempotent CI/CD job to register all these flows without creating a new version on every CI run?

[cicdw]

Hi @gatesn - this is a great question; fundamentally, you only need to re-register whenever flow.serialize() changes, so if you had a way of tracking that value you could run a manual check. We might consider exposing a built-in mechanism for this, but I'd want to think through the details to make sure it's used correctly.

One thought that comes to mind is to expose an idempotency_key in the GraphQL API for register Flows - flow.register could then use some deterministic hash of flow.serialize() as an idempotency key under-the-hood, and then you could safely call flow.register as many times as you want and Prefect would make sure new versions only get registered when they're necessary.

I'm open to other ideas as well!