Hello people, this might be a stupid question. I am currently customising a docker-compose where I want to do a small demo with prefect locally. I am following the tutorials and right now I am trying to understand the

agent

. If I want to spin it up locally just to try I tried:

pipenv run prefect agent start

But I get that no token is provided, according to the

DOC

it seems like:

prefect.config.cloud.auth_token

should provide this to me automatically? I don't really find the documentation in how to spin it up with the

UI

really intuitive and if somebody can explain how to set the

TOKEN

locally I would appreciate it.

Hi Simon, the agent is responsible for running flows with Prefect Cloud. Do you have a Cloud account?

The cloud service seems to be down, do I need this to be able to spin up the

UI

locally?

We’re up at the moment

Okay I will check again

To get a

RUNNER

scoped token to pass to your agent, you’ll need to log into Prefect Cloud’s UI and go to Team -> API Tokens

I see, my bad. I currently get this.

We're currently in beta but letting new users in every day. As soon as we're ready for you we'll be in touch.
Look for an email from <mailto:hello@prefect.io|hello@prefect.io>!

When I login.

That’s currently expected

Okay so do I need to buy something to be able to run it locally with the UI?

However, you can always run your flow by calling

flow.run()

yes but that is with no UI, which makes it rather uninteresting atm

Prefect Core on its own doesn’t have a UI since that requires a persistence layer, auth, etc which we found were things users didn’t actually want to manage themselves

so again, to have the UI I need to buy the cloud service?

okay thanks

You can learn a little more about how data moves between core and cloud here: https://docs.prefect.io/cloud/dataflow.html

thanks

Anytime! Let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help