No—Prefect 2.20’s

prefect worker start

does not have a built-in

--background

option. For a quick background process on Linux/macOS:

nohup prefect worker start --pool my-pool \
  > prefect-worker.log 2>&1 &

echo $! > prefect-worker.pid

Stop it gracefully with:

kill "$(cat prefect-worker.pid)"

For a persistent worker, prefer a process manager such as

systemd

, Supervisor, Docker, or Kubernetes so it restarts after crashes or reboots. Also, Prefect 2.x is no longer under active development; current development is on Prefect 3.x.

On Windows there’s still no Prefect-native

--background

option. From PowerShell, you can detach the worker with:

$worker = Start-Process prefect `
  -ArgumentList "worker start --pool my-pool" `
  -WindowStyle Hidden `
  -RedirectStandardOutput "prefect-worker.log" `
  -RedirectStandardError "prefect-worker-error.log" `
  -PassThru

$worker.Id | Set-Content "prefect-worker.pid"

Stop it later with:

Stop-Process -Id (Get-Content "prefect-worker.pid")

For a worker that should survive reboots and restart on failure, run it as a Windows service using a service manager such as NSSM, or use Windows Task Scheduler. That’s preferable to

Start-Process

for production.