skipping_tasks.md

Skipping tasks

Skipping tasks is one way to prevent tasks from being executed. It is more persistent but less dynamic than selecting tasks via {ref}markers <markers> or {ref}expressions <expressions>.

In contrast to tasks in ignored files, ignored with {confval}ignore, pytask will still check whether skipped tasks are consistent with the DAG of the project.

For example, you can use the {func}@pytask.mark.skip <pytask.mark.skip> decorator to skip tasks during development that take too much time to compute right now.

Not only will this task be skipped, but all tasks that depend on time_intensive_product.pkl.

Conditional skipping

In large projects, you may have many long-running tasks that you only want to execute on a remote server but not when you are not working locally.

In this case, use the {func}@pytask.mark.skipif <pytask.mark.skipif> decorator, which requires a condition and a reason as arguments.

Place the condition variable in a different module than the task, so you can change it without causing a rerun of the task.

# Content of a config.py

NO_LONG_RUNNING_TASKS = True

# Content of task_long_running.py
from pathlib import Path

import pytask
from config import NO_LONG_RUNNING_TASKS


@pytask.mark.skipif(NO_LONG_RUNNING_TASKS, reason="Skip long-running tasks.")
def task_that_takes_really_long_to_run(
    path: Path = Path("time_intensive_product.pkl"),
): ...

Further reading

• {doc}selecting_tasks.
• {confval}ignore on how to ignore task files.