Installation · Quickstart · Build workflows · Deploy workflows · Prefect Cloud

Prefect

Prefect is a workflow orchestration framework for building data pipelines in Python. It's the simplest way to elevate a script into a production workflow. With Prefect, you can build resilient, dynamic data pipelines that react to the world around them and recover from unexpected changes.

With just a few lines of code, data teams can confidently automate any data process with features such as scheduling, caching, retries, and event-based automations.

Workflow activity is tracked and can be monitored with a self-hosted Prefect server instance or managed Prefect Cloud dashboard.

[!TIP] Prefect flows can handle retries, dependencies, and even complex branching logic

Check our docs or see the example below to learn more!

Getting started

Prefect requires Python 3.10+. To install the latest version of Prefect, run one of the following commands:

pip install -U prefect

uv add prefect

Then create and run a Python file that uses Prefect flow and task decorators to orchestrate and observe your workflow - in this case, a simple script that fetches the number of GitHub stars from a repository:

from prefect import flow, task
import httpx


@task(log_prints=True)
def get_stars(repo: str):
    url = f"https://api.github.com/repos/{repo}"
    count = httpx.get(url).json()["stargazers_count"]
    print(f"{repo} has {count} stars!")


@flow(name="GitHub Stars")
def github_stars(repos: list[str]):
    for repo in repos:
        get_stars(repo)


# run the flow!
if __name__ == "__main__":
    github_stars(["PrefectHQ/prefect"])

Fire up a Prefect server and open the UI at http://localhost:4200 to see what happened:

prefect server start

To run your workflow on a schedule, turn it into a deployment and schedule it to run every minute by changing the last line of your script to the following:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    github_stars.serve(
        name="first-deployment",
        cron="* * * * *",
        parameters={"repos": ["PrefectHQ/prefect"]}
    )

You now have a process running locally that is looking for scheduled deployments! Additionally you can run your workflow manually from the UI or CLI. You can even run deployments in response to events.

[!TIP] Where to go next - check out our documentation to learn more about:

• Deploying flows to production environments
• Adding error handling and retries
• Integrating with your existing tools
• Setting up team collaboration features

Prefect Cloud

Prefect Cloud provides workflow orchestration for the modern data enterprise. By automating over 200 million data tasks monthly, Prefect empowers diverse organizations — from Fortune 50 leaders such as Progressive Insurance to innovative disruptors such as Cash App — to increase engineering productivity, reduce pipeline errors, and cut data workflow compute costs.

Read more about Prefect Cloud here or sign up to try it for yourself.

prefect-client

If your use case is geared towards communicating with Prefect Cloud or a remote Prefect server, check out our prefect-client. It is a lighter-weight option for accessing client-side functionality in the Prefect SDK and is ideal for use in ephemeral execution environments.

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