Sorry if this is a dumb question but what's the simplest way to run an agent in the background? I've just been using a screen session.

If you are running the agent on a Windows machine, you can create a scheduled task in Windows Task Scheduler (and if you want you can configure the Windows Task to be run every time at system startup)

I see, thanks. I'm using ubuntu at the moment though.

Ok, then you could as well setup a systemd service

Or supervisor as described in the docs: https://docs.prefect.io/orchestration/agents/local.html#using-with-supervisor

Thanks Anurag, I was looking for something like that.