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Skipping tasks

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

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

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

from pathlib import Path
from typing import Annotated

import pytask
from pytask import Product


@pytask.mark.skip()
def task_long_running(
    path: Annotated[Path, Product] = Path("time_intensive_product.pkl"),
) -> None: ...

Not only will this task be skipped, but all tasks depending 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 @pytask.mark.skipif decorator, which requires a condition and a reason as arguments.

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

config.py
NO_LONG_RUNNING_TASKS = True
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