Hi community, I have a question around launching Agents and keeping them working. I understand, one of the most handy options is just using

nohup

, however, in order to do that, I have to execute everything with the

flow.run_agent()

option and then comment that line of code to execute the flows. The alternative is through CLI, however, I couldn’t make it work (it doesn’t file the libraries I need to execute, despite of using the

-p

param) Which is your experience/view here?

Hi Alberto! On my side I built my own custom CLI (w/Click) to launch the Agent. I had to in order to build Dynamic labels and recover my Tokens from AWS SecretsManager.

echo "Starting Agent"
pipenv run ./cli.py start-agent "${AGENT_NAME}" --token-secret-id=${AGENT_RUNNER_TOKEN_SECRET_ID}

BEAUTIFUL!!! This is precisely the inspiration I was looking for!

Poke me if you need more detail on my implementation!

Raphaël I like that script! 💪

Kinda primitive for now, but I’m expecting to add more Metadata in a near future

The only thing I’ll add is: if you’re looking to run Prefect in a production environment, you may want to consider moving to a containerized setup of some kind sooner rather than later

I’m already running under Fargate/Docker. A) I’m building the image on my computer using either stable version or “dirty” github repo. B) Pushing Image to AWS ECR C) Launching a Fargate (Using AWS CDK) for my agent. D) The agent register all of its flow under his own label+project and E) Starts itself with the same labels.

Those comments were directed more toward Alberto since I recognize him as a newer community member from a week or two ago 😄

Oh! I tought these were for me 😛

haha no worries!

I am new, yes! Quite glad to be here, actually 🙂

I am considering doing something similar for our set up in which we are running a DockerAgent in a Linux (ubuntu) VM. I had some docker permission issues running

prefect agent

with

supervisord

and was considering an alternative. Would docker-compose be a good way to run the agent inside of a container using a `cli`similar to Raphaël's? Is docker-compose with a restart policy a good way to restart the agent if it dies unexpectedly?

@Pedro Machado My Setup relies on Fargate to restart the Docker in the event of the agent exiting. The way I’ve setuped the Docker’s CMD, my CLI Script that boots the Agent is PID 1 (Using

dumb-init

) IMO this is a perfectly valid setup if you’re trusting docker-compose!

@Raphaël Riel Being inspired by your script, do you mind sharing a bit more your

set_temporary_function

, please? My only purpose is to learn a way to do it. I did it already by my own (and it works), but wanted to know how you managed to do it with the

with set_temporary_function(params):

approach. Please, feel free not to answer 🙂

This method is built-in with Prefect. The Prefect’s agent CLI is using this method. I have no credit for this one 😛 See

from prefect.utilities.configuration import set_temporary_config

LOL 🙂