A simple guide to understand and make Prefect work with your own docker-compose configuration.

This allows you to package your Prefect instance for Kubernetes or offline use.

• Prefect - Docker Compose
  • Run the server
  • Run one or multiple agents
  • Run your first flow via the Prefect API
    • Principles to understand
    • Flow with Local storage (easiest)
    • Flow with S3 Storage
    • Flow with Docker storage
      • Preparing the Registry
      • Start the Docker in Docker agents
      • Registering the flow

Open and edit the server/.env file.
All PREFECT_SERVER_* options are explained in the official documentation and listed in the config.toml file.

Then you can run :

docker-compose -f server/docker-compose.yml up -d

Insert the following content in file ~/.prefect/config.toml :

# ~/.prefect/config.toml
debug = true

# base configuration directory (typically you won't change this!)
home_dir = "~/.prefect"

backend = "server"

[server]
host = "http://172.17.0.1"
port = "4200"
host_port = "4200"
endpoint = "${server.host}:${server.port}"

Finally, we need to create a tenant. Execute on your host :

pip3 install prefect
prefect backend server
prefect server create-tenant --name default --slug default

Access the UI at localhost:8080

Agents are services that run your scheduled flows.

Open and edit the agent/config.toml file.

ℹ️ In each config.toml, you will find the 172.17.0.1 IP address. This is the IP of the Docker daemon on which are exposed all exposed ports of your containers. This allows containers launched from different docker-compose networks to communicate. Change it if yours is different (check your daemon IP by typing ip a | grep docker0).

Here, mine is 192.168.254.1 but the default is generally to 172.17.0.1.

Then you can run :

docker-compose -f agent/docker-compose.yml up -d

ℹ️ You can run the agent on another machine than the one with the Prefect server. Edit the agent/config.toml file for that.

Maybe you want to instanciate multiple agents automatically ?

docker-compose -f agent/docker-compose.yml up -d --scale agent=3 agent

💬 Execution in your cloud; orchestration in ours

This means the Prefect server never stores your code. It just orchestrates the running (optionally the scheduling) of it.

1. When coding a flow, you need first to register it to the Prefect server through a script. In that script, you may ask the server to run your flow 3 times a day, for example.

2. Your code never lies on the Prefect server : this means the code has to be stored somewhere accessible to the agents in order to be executed.

   Prefect has a lot of storage options but the most famous are : Local, S3 and Docker.

   • Local : saves the flows to be run on disk. So the volume where you save the flows must be shared among your client and your agent(s). Requires your agent to have the same environment than your client (Python modules, packages installed etc... (the same Dockerfile if your agent and client are containers))
   • S3 : similar to local, but saves the flows to be run in S3 objects.
   • Docker : saves the flows to be run as Docker images to your Docker Registry so your agents can easily run the code.

ℹ️ If your agents are installed among multiple machines, I recommend you to mount a shared directory with SSHFS.

Open the client/config.toml file and edit the IP to match your Prefect instance. Then you can run :

docker-compose -f client/docker-compose.yml up # Executes weather.py

Now your flow is registered. You can access the UI to run it.

⚠️ I don't recommend this method if you plan to schedule a lot of flows every minute. MinIO times out regurarly in that case (maybe AWS wouldn't).

docker-compose -f client_s3/docker-compose.yml up -d minio # Starts MinIO

docker-compose -f client_s3/docker-compose.yml up weather # Executes weather.py

This method requires our client AND agent containers to have access to Docker so they can package or load the image in which the flow will be executed. We use Docker in Docker for that.

sudo apt install apache2-utils # required to generate basic_auth credentials
cd client_docker/registry/auth && htpasswd -B -c .htpasswd myusername && cd -

docker-compose -f client_docker/docker-compose.yml up -d registry

{
  "insecure-registries": ["172.17.0.1:5000"]
}

docker login http://172.17.0.1:5000 # with myusername and the password you typed

docker-compose -f agent_docker/docker-compose.yml up -d

docker build . -f ./client_docker/execution.Dockerfile -t 172.17.0.1:5000/weather/base_image

docker push 172.17.0.1:5000/weather/base_image

docker-compose -f ./client_docker/docker-compose.yml up weather