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4. Starting agents

Repositories are hosted by agents - each agent can have its own package dependencies, and be deployed within your infrastructure as needed - for example one agent could be deployed on an on-premise bare-metal server with a GPU, and another agent could be deployed as a Docker image on an auto-scaling cloud cluster.

An agent is a process that's responsible for executing the code required by your workflow - it will:

  1. Listen for commands from the orchestrator.
  2. Invoke and monitor executions of operations (in forked sub-processes).
  3. Report the status (including results, errors, etc.) of executions back to the orchestrator.

Importantly, they can be run locally, automatically watching for code changes, restarting, and registering workflows as needed.

Initialise​

Use the configure command to populate a configuration. This isn't necessary, but avoids having to specify configuration manually in the following commands. Run the following command:

coflux configure

You will be prompted to enter the host (localhost:7777), the project ID, and the environment name.

Run​

Now the agent can be started. Run the following command:

coflux agent --dev hello.py

In the web UI you will be able to see your workflow appear in the sidebar.

Next, let's initiate a run...