Overview and Setup

Welcome to the Prefect Deployment Tutorial! This tutorial will cover:

• Setting up your environment to use either Prefect Cloud or Prefect Server
• Configuring and registering your first Flow
• Using a Prefect Agent to run that Flow

If you haven't yet, you might want to go through the Prefect Core Tutorial, which covers in greater detail how to write Prefect Flows.

Install Prefect

Before starting the tutorial, you'll need a working install of the core Prefect library.

You can find installation instructions here.

Select an Orchestration Backend

Prefect supports two different orchestration backends:

• cloud - our hosted service
• server - the open source backend, deployed on your infrastructure

To use Prefect with either backend, you must first select that backend via the CLI:

$ prefect backend cloud

$ prefect backend server

Note that you can change backends at any time by rerunning the prefect backend ... command.

Authenticating with Prefect Cloud Cloud

If you're using Prefect Cloud, you'll also need to authenticate with the backend before you can proceed further.

Create a Personal Access Token

To authenticate, you'll need to create a Personal Access Token and configure it with the Prefect Command Line Interface.

• Login to https://cloud.prefect.io
• In the hamburger menu in the top left corner go to User -> Personal Access Tokens -> Create A Token.
• Copy the created token
• Configure the CLI to use the access token by running

prefect auth login -t <COPIED_TOKEN>

Create a Runner Token

Running deployed Flows with an Agent also requires a RUNNER-scoped API token for the Agent. You can create one using the CLI:

prefect auth create-token -n my-runner-token -s RUNNER

You'll need this token later in the tutorial. You can save it locally either in your ~/.prefect/config.toml config file, or as an environment variable:

# ~/.prefect/config.toml
[cloud.agent]
auth_token = <COPIED_RUNNER_TOKEN>

export PREFECT__CLOUD__AGENT__AUTH_TOKEN=<COPIED_RUNNER_TOKEN>