In prefect 2.0, whats the alternative command of

$ prefect backend server

prefect orion start

will allow you to achieve orchestration locally and give you access to a UI without needing Prefect cloud.

@Taylor Curran Can you confirm that you must have a server running (even locally) to run flows? The documentation implies that you don’t and I just wanted to check. Thx!

@Robert Bastian I can confirm it for you, since I just did it. You don't. 🙂

@Oscar Björhn - Weird, without Orion Server running I get this error locally:

RuntimeError: Cannot create flow run. Failed to reach API at <http://127.0.0.1:4200/api/>.

The Orion server needs to be running for flows to be orchestrated. You can “run flows” locally sans orion by running the python file, though this is not a true flow run.

@Taylor Curran Even just running the python script - e.g. “python flow.py” I still get the same error. Here is my “flow”:

import requests
from prefect import flow

@flow(name="test")
def call_api(url:str):
    return requests.get(url).json()

api_result = call_api("<http://time.jsontest.com/>")
print(api_result)

Sorry @Robert Bastian, what was the error again?

@Taylor Curran the script says there is an error communicating with the API server. And if you run

prefect version

you can see the server type is

hosted

, not

ephemeral

. I had to use the workaround of explicitly clearing the

PREFECT_API_URL=

variable before calling the

prefect

program in order to switch back to the ephemeral API.