Prefect Docs

# Installing Prefect

# Requirements

Prefect requires Python 3.6+. If you're new to Python, we recommend installing the Anaconda distribution.

# Installation

To install Prefect, run:

pip install prefect

or, if you prefer to use conda:

conda install -c conda-forge prefect

or pipenv:

pipenv install --pre prefect

# Optional dependencies

Prefect ships with a number of optional dependencies, which can be installed using "extras" syntax:

pip install "prefect[extra_1, extra_2]"

Examples of extra packages include:

  • all_extras: includes all of the optional dependencies
  • dev: tools for developing Prefect itself
  • templates: tools for working with string templates
  • viz: tools for visualizing Prefect flows
  • aws: tools for interacting with Amazon Web Services
  • google: tools for interacting with Google Cloud Platform
  • kubernetes: tools for interacting with Kubernetes API objects
  • twitter: tools for interacting with the Twitter API
  • airtable: tools for interacting with the Airtable API
  • spacy: tools for building NLP pipelines using Spacy
  • redis: tools for interacting with a Redis database

# Running the local server and UI

In addition to the Prefect Cloud platform, Prefect includes an open-source server and UI for orchestrating and managing flows. The local server stores flow metadata in a Postgres database and exposes a GraphQL API.

Before running the server for the first time, run prefect backend server to configure Prefect for local orchestration. Please note the server requires Docker and Docker Compose to be running.

To start the server, UI, and all required infrastructure, run:

prefect server start

Once all components are running, you can view the UI by visiting http://localhost:8080.

Please note that executing flows from the server requires at least one Prefect Agent to be running: prefect agent start.

Finally, to register any flow with the server, call flow.register(). For more detail, please see the orchestration docs.

# Docker

Prefect provides Docker images for master builds and versioned releases here.

To run the latest Prefect Docker image:

docker run -it prefecthq/prefect:latest

Image tag breakdown:

Tag Prefect Version Python Version
latest most recent PyPi version 3.7
master master build 3.7
latest-python3.8 most recent PyPi version 3.8
latest-python3.7 most recent PyPi version 3.7
latest-python3.6 most recent PyPi version 3.6
X.Y.Z-python3.8 X.Y.Z 3.8
X.Y.Z-python3.7 X.Y.Z 3.7
X.Y.Z-python3.6 X.Y.Z 3.6
all_extras most recent PyPi version 3.8
all_extras-X.Y.Z X.Y.Z 3.8

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