Hi team cannot see how the --namespace flag makes any difference to the namespace under which the step functions gets deployed

Hi @clever-pencil-68951, I'm new here and not an expert, but this morning I discovered that the namespace parameter seems to affect where an upstream result should be read from, but the

--tag

parameter is how you affect what namespace a flow is written to. Here's where I was reading about it: https://docs.metaflow.org/scaling/tagging#tags-as-namespaces Hopefully someone will correct me here if I am steering you wrong.

At first this article did not make sense to me, but playing around (experimenting) and actually looking at what happens, then going back to the article - it is starting to make a bit more sense to me now 👍

@clever-pencil-68951 I was thinking about this again and then reading through the docs some more and it looks like

--tag

is more of a manual way of controlling namespace, providing a lot of power. Using the

@project

decorator in combination with usage of the

--production

and

--branch

parameters looks like the more "batteries included" team-centric way of driving this behavior. https://docs.metaflow.org/production/coordinating-larger-metaflow-projects#the-project-decorator

If

ProjectFlow

did not have a

@project decorator

, it would get deployed as a workflow called

ProjectFlow

on AWS Step Functions by

step-functions create

. Only one version of

ProjectFlow

could exist on a production orchestrator at a time. Everyone deploying the flow would need to know the production token assigned to the deployment.

The

@project

decorator adds a user-specific prefix in the workflow name: the workflow gets deployed with a name like

example_project.user.YOURNAME.ProjectFlow

where

YOURNAME

is your username. Metaflow gets the username by looking, in order, at the following environment variables:

METAFLOW_USER

,

SUDO_USER

,

USERNAME

and

USER

.

This allows multiple developers to deploy their workflows on a production orchestrator without fear that they might interfere with someone else's deployment.

Hi @cuddly-family-48123 I've used the project decorator in my flow project, below are my step functions. The naming does include a prefix coming from the config output produced by the Terraform "metaflow" module. I think I will just reset the METAFLOW_SFN_STATE_MACHINE_PREFIX = "". Then I will have my namespace @project.user.METAFLOW_USER.FlowClass. This is how the "user" class works that is available via the project decorator. I still have to play with the other 2 classes available via the project decorator: test, prod