Dear Prefect community, I need some help as we are trying out prefect as our tool for workflow orchestration tool. I am wanting to create a simple workflow that basically pulls an image from a private docker repository and that it runs it on the agent (which has access to the hosts docker socket). This docker image when running will perform some tasks. Is there a guide I can use to create this minimalistic setup? Or could someone help me figure this one out?

hi @Dijar Vrella here's a guide for getting started • define your flow

from prefect import flow


@flow(log_prints=True)
def hello_docker():
    """
    A simple flow that prints 'Hello, Docker!' to the logs
    """
    print("Hello, Docker!")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    hello_docker()

• define your deployment ◦ using `prefect.yaml` (my preference) ◦ using `.deploy` • start a worker

prefect worker start --type docker --pool my-pool

Hi Nate, thank you for your reply. I will have a look at this and come back with questions if I have. So in this hello_docker function I would have to specify i.e. run this thing or something right?

the

hello_docker

function in my example represents your flow that a worker would submit for execution as a container so if you went the

prefect.yaml

route, you would • create your deployment with

prefect deploy -n hello-docker

given the 2 files I referenced • start a worker `prefect worker start --type docker --pool your-pool`(which creates

your-pool

if it doesnt already exist) • either run

prefect deployment run ...

or click run on your deployment in the UI to have it execute ie the worker is responsible for picking up the function at your

entrypoint

and submitting it according to the infra config (i.e work pool)

oh so I see this flow only runs the new container that get build then docker image can have its own entrypoint that does whatever it does but from prefect perspective we just using this to trigger that part right?

hi @Dijar Vrella - you can always use the

docker

client directly from within a flow like

hello_docker

that could use any docker features that the work pool may not support for example the

gpus

flag is not currently supported directly in the docker work pool (though we'd like to add it) so you could just write / deploy a flow that invokes docker however you need you can schedule a call here