Install Prefect
Prefect is published as a Python package, which requires Python 3.9 or newer. We recommend installing Prefect in a Python virtual environment.
To install Prefect with pip, run:
To confirm that Prefect was installed successfully, run:
You should see output similar to:
Windows installation
You can install and run Prefect via Windows PowerShell, the Windows Command Prompt, or conda. After installation, you may need to manually add the Python local packages Scripts
folder to your Path
environment variable.
The Scripts
folder path looks something like:
Review the pip install
output messages for the Scripts
folder path on your system.
Minimal Prefect installation
The prefect-client
library is a minimal installation of Prefect designed for interacting with Prefect Cloud or a remote self-hosted Prefect server instance.
prefect-client
enables a subset of Prefect’s capabilities with a smaller installation size, making it ideal for use in lightweight, resource-constrained, or ephemeral environments.
It omits all CLI and server components found in the prefect
library.
To install the latest release of prefect-client
, run:
Next steps
You also need an API server, either:
- Prefect Cloud, a managed solution that provides strong scaling, performance, and security, or
- Self-hosted Prefect server, an API server that you run on your own infrastructure where you are responsible for scaling and any authentication and authorization.
Now that you have Prefect installed, go through the quickstart to try it out.
Learn more about release versions in the Prefect release notes.
See our Contributing docs for instructions on installing Prefect for development.
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