# Problems starting recipes programatically

**URL:** <https://support.prodi.gy/t/problems-starting-recipes-programatically/1994>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Tags:** usage, api\
**Created:** [September 9, 2019, 3:30pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/problems-starting-recipes-programatically/1994 "2019-09-09T15:30:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![edward](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/90db22/32.png) [@edward](https://support.prodi.gy/u/edward)\
**Post date:** [September 9, 2019, 3:30pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/problems-starting-recipes-programatically/1994/1 "2019-09-09T15:30:54Z")

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Hi,

I'm trying to integrate Prodigy into a Python-based automated workflow. I want to start a task like this:

```
from prodigy import recipes
    
output=recipes.ner.make_gold(
    dataset='ner-dataset',
    spacy_model=Path(r'/mnt/c/model'),
    label=['MY_ENT']
)

```

This works, and `output` is then a dictionary like this `{'view_id': 'ner_manual', 'dataset': 'ner-dataset'...}`.

I assume this is a config for the web server to use. But I can't see where I need to use it to start it serving. I tried `server(output, {})`, but there's an error `AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute 'view_id'`. So I assume I need to wrap `output` in an object first?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ines](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/ines/32/3_2.png) [@ines](https://support.prodi.gy/u/ines)\
**Post date:** [September 9, 2019, 3:45pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/problems-starting-recipes-programatically/1994/2 "2019-09-09T15:45:33Z")

</div>

Hi! Recipes return a dictionary of components, that are then used to create a controller and start the server when executed on the command line. I think what you're looking for is the `prodigy.serve` method that does all of this for you – you can find the details in your `PRODIGY_README.html`.

A few things to note that are currently not ideal but a side-effect of running the recipes that way. (I'd love to come up with a slightly smarter recipe decorator and serve helper, but it'd probably be a breaking change).

- `prodigy.serve` takes the recipe arguments as _positional arguments_ in order. So even if you're not using one of the arguments (and wouldn't set it on the command line), you'll have to pass in `None`.
- Some recipes use handy functionality provided by our command line parsing library `plac` and convert the incoming arguments. For instance, if you pass in `--label PERSON,ORG`, it will call a helper function to split the string and turn it into a proper list. When you run the recipes from Python, we typically don't need these helpers – so when you call the recipe function and it needs a list of labels, you'll need to pass in `['PERSON', 'ORG']` instead of `'PERSON,ORG'`.

Finally, you could also execute Prodigy in a subprocess or using something like [Fabric](http://www.fabfile.org/) and compose the commands that way.