About debugging and the schedule interval

I’m currently testing some Prefect 2 flows on my local machine. My flow has a daily schedule and it will collect data from a given source for that day. I’m using the following expression to determine what’s the current schedule interval start time:

context.get_run_context().start_time

However, sometimes I want to debug a specific day from the past and I don’t want to bother creating a new oneshot schedule just for this. So I’ve created a hacky mechanism where I use an environment variable that, if present, will override the start_time from above with its value. It works, but I wanna know if there is an easier way to approach this kind of situation.

Is there?

1 Like

why not use this?

from datetime import datetime
datetime.today()

my hot take is that if your pipeline depends on the orchestrator’s schedule time, then something is wrong in the design - you shouldn’t have to rely on that, it’s kind of unwritten best practice I’ve seen among data engineers

What if I need to backfill my schedule? How is this done in Prefect? I’m trying to adapt an existing Airflow DAG as a Prefect Flow.

here is a detailed example: