Setting up Your Project
We will start by creating a new project and setting up our development environment. First, create a new directory for your project and navigate to it.
~ $ mkdir chatapp ~ $ cd chatapp
Next, we will create a virtual environment for our project. This is optional, but recommended. In this example, we will use venv to create our virtual environment.
chatapp $ python3 -m venv venv $ source venv/bin/activate
Now, we will install Reflex and create a new project. This will create a new directory structure in our project directory.
Note: When prompted to select a template, choose option 0 for a blank project.
chatapp $ pip install reflex chatapp $ reflex init ────────────────────────────────── Initializing chatapp ─────────────────────────────────── Success: Initialized chatapp chatapp $ ls assets chatapp rxconfig.py venv
You can run the template app to make sure everything is working.
chatapp $ reflex run ─────────────────────────────────── Starting Reflex App ─────────────────────────────────── Compiling: ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100% 1/1 0:00:00 ─────────────────────────────────────── App Running ─────────────────────────────────────── App running at: http://localhost:3000
You should see your app running at http://localhost:3000.
Reflex also starts the backend server which handles all the state management and communication with the frontend. You can test the backend server is running by navigating to http://localhost:8000/ping.
Now that we have our project set up, in the next section we will start building our app!