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Prefect Version

2.x

Describe the current behavior

I’ve set up an Automation to re-run flows that crash. This nicely catches random crashes but goes haywire when an error inherent to the flow causes crashes — the flow will re-run and crash ad infinitum.

At the suggestion of @WillRaphaelson on the Prefect Slack Community I attempted to use the retries parameter in a flow as an alternate mechanism for retrying that respects limits.

@flow(
    name="my-flow”,
    retries=3
)
def my_flow(
# stuff

I then deployed the flow and deliberately crashed it* to test the retry functionality.

Unfortunately, the retries parameter did not cause retries on the flow when it crashed. If I turned on the relevant automation to trigger retries, the retries parameter did not limit the automation — I observed 5 retries before I canceled it.

Environment
Python 3.10.9
Prefect 2.20
Mac OS X 13.4.1

*My Prefect deployments are set up to install any packages specified with the EXTRA_PIP_PACKAGES environment variable prior to runtime. I induced an artificial crash of the fly by specifying {“env.EXTRA_PIP_PACKAGES” : “not a package”} in the relevant deployment’s Infrastructure Overrides.

Describe the proposed behavior

Ideally setting retries=n would cause a flow to retry not only on Failure, but on Crashed, a maximum of n times.

A bonus would be to have this retry functionality play nicely with Automation retries, just in case.

An alternate path would be to introduce a limits parameter on the Automation trigger. But handling this within a flow and not an automation is preferable, given that it keeps things closer to source + Prefect limits most users’ total Automations.

Example Use

The use of retries in the code below (copied from above) should work.

@flow(
    name="my-flow”,
    retries=3
)
def my_flow(
# stuff

Additional context

No response