Short answer: there isn’t a

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flag for

prefect worker start

in Prefect 3.x. Why it’s not there: - Prefect intentionally doesn’t implement process supervision/daemonization in the CLI. Backgrounding a long‑running process is best handled by your OS or orchestrator (systemd, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) to get proper restart policies, logging, and signal handling across platforms. - I couldn’t find an official rationale or issue specifically discussing a

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flag. Docs: Workers (Prefect 3.x) Common ways to run a worker “detached”: - Linux/macOS (quick and dirty):

nohup prefect worker start --pool test-work-pool > worker.out 2>&1 & disown

or run in `tmux`/`screen`. - systemd (recommended on Linux):

[Unit]
  Description=Prefect Worker
  After=network.target

  [Service]
  Type=simple
  User=prefect
  WorkingDirectory=/opt/prefect
  Environment="PREFECT_API_URL=..."
  Environment="PREFECT_API_KEY=..."
  ExecStart=/usr/bin/env bash -lc 'prefect worker start --pool test-work-pool'
  Restart=always
  RestartSec=5
  StandardOutput=append:/var/log/prefect-worker.log
  StandardError=append:/var/log/prefect-worker.err

  [Install]
  WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
  sudo systemctl enable --now prefect-worker.service

- Docker (let Docker do the daemonization):

docker run -d --name prefect-worker \
    -e PREFECT_API_URL=... \
    -e PREFECT_API_KEY=... \
    your-prefect-image \
    prefect worker start --pool test-work-pool

- Kubernetes: run the worker as a Deployment so it’s always on and restarted by the scheduler. If you’d like a native

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, feel free to open a feature request: Create a Prefect issue. If you share your environment (OS, container/orchestrator, how you deploy), I can give you a tailored, copy‑paste setup.

there's no specific reason this doesn't exist outside of lack of demand