@Marvin I'm interested in running flows on a remote computer while I locally host the server. How do I go about letting the flows that are running on the remote computer report to the local server?

To have flows running on a remote computer report to a local server, you will need to set up an agent that is configured to connect to the Prefect server you are hosting locally. The agent acts as a bridge between your remote flow runs and the local Prefect server, polling for scheduled work and deploying the corresponding flow runs. Setting up an agent on your remote machine to report to your local server involves the following steps: 1. Ensure you have Prefect installed on both your local server and the remote machine. 2. Start the Orion server on your local machine with the

prefect orion start

command. Your local server should now be accessible at

<http://127.0.0.1:4200>

. 3. On the remote machine, configure an agent to connect to your local Prefect server. The connection details for the Prefect server (includes the IP address and port) need to be provided to the agent. This usually involves setting environment variables like

PREFECT__CLOUD__API_URL

to point to your local server's address. 4. Start the agent on the remote machine with the necessary configuration that points to your local server. Here are some helpful links from the Prefect documentation and resources that explain the concepts of running Prefect in such an environment: - Prefect Agents Documentation - Prefect Blog Post Explaining Orion and Deployments Please ensure to delve deeper into the documentation for specific configurations suitable to your network setup. If you are just starting out and need to see code examples, we can look into some code examples for Prefect as well.

Can you expand on point 3?

To configure an agent to connect to your local server, you'll need to set the

PREFECT_API_URL

environment variable on the remote machine. This variable should point to the address of the Prefect server which is running on your local computer. Here is the general format for setting the

PREFECT_API_URL

in your environment:

shell
export PREFECT_API_URL="http://[your-local-server-ip]:[port]/api"

Replace

[your-local-server-ip]

with the local network IP address of your computer where the server is running, and

[port]

with the port that the Prefect server is listening on (default is 4200). Once this is set up, you can start an agent on the remote machine with the following command:

shell
prefect agent start -p [work pool name]

You must provide at least one work pool name that the agent will poll for work. If the work pool does not exist, it will be created. Ensure that the work pool used here matches the one you've configured your flows to run in, so that the agent correctly identifies and executes the flow runs. For more detailed instructions and to understand all configurations surrounding Prefect agents, you can refer to the Prefect Agents Documentation. The section "Starting an agent" specifically addresses the command used to initiate an agent after setting the appropriate environment variables. Furthermore, for more complex configurations or managing these settings in a scalable way, you may want to explore using the

prefect config set

command as mentioned in Prefect Cloud Connecting. This command helps you set the configuration in the default Prefect profile or within specific profiles you create for different environments.