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Quick Start

Welcome to Prefect!

Whether you've been working with Prefect for years or this is your first time, this collection of tutorials will guide you through the process of defining, running, monitoring and eventually automating your first Prefect 2 workflow.

First and foremost, you'll need a working version of Prefect 2 installed.

From there, you can follow along with the tutorials, which iteratively build up the various concepts and features that you'll need to get the most out of your workflows.

If you want to take a deeper dive into the concepts that make up the Prefect ecosystem, check out our Concepts documentation.

Get started with Prefect 2

To jump right in and get started using Prefect 2, you'll need to complete the following steps:

That's it! You're ready to start writing local flows. Flow run details for these flows will appear in the Prefect 2 UI without additional configuration.

If you want to start running flows on a schedule, via the API, from the Prefect UI, or on distributed infrastructure, you'll need to understand a few additional concepts and perform some configuration.

  • Start a local Prefect server with prefect server start or create a free Prefect Cloud account.
  • Set PREFECT_API_URL to enable communication between your execution environment and the Prefect server or Prefect Cloud API.
  • Configure storage to persist flow and task data.
  • Create a deployment for a flow, giving the API metadata about where your flow's code is stored and how your flow should be run.
  • Start an agent that can execute scheduled or ad-hoc flow runs from your deployments.

If you have used Prefect 1 and are familiar with Prefect workflows, we recommend reading through the Prefect 2 tutorials. Prefect 2 flows and subflows offer new functionality, and running deployments with agents and work pools reflects a significant change in how you configure orchestration components.

Migrating from Prefect 1

If you are already running flows with Prefect 1, our Migration Guide provides an overview of changes you'll find in Prefect 2 and suggested practices for migrating your existing flows to work with Prefect 2.

And as suggested previously, we recommend reading through the Prefect 2 tutorials for worked examples of writing flows and tasks with Prefect 2.

Additional Resources

If you don't find what you're looking for here there are many other ways to engage, ask questions and provide feedback: