This lesson's interactive features are locked, please to keep using them

Python Setup

We're going to use a virtual environment for our project.

Virtual environments are Python's way to keep dependencies (e.g. the web scraping and http client libraries we're going to use) separate from other projects on our machine.

Assignment

Use uv to create a new project. It will create the directory and also initialize git.

uv init --no-package your-project-name
cd your-project-name

Create a virtual environment at the top level of your project directory:

uv venv

Activate the virtual environment:

source .venv/bin/activate

You should see (your-project-name) at the beginning of your terminal prompt, for example, mine is:

(webcrawler) wagslane@MacBook-Pro-2 webcrawler %

Always make sure that your virtual environment is activated when running the code or using the Boot.dev CLI.

Use uv to add three dependencies to the project. They will be added to the file pyproject.toml:

uv add beautifulsoup4==4.13.4
uv add aiohttp==3.12.12
uv add requests==2.32.4

This tells Python that this project requires these dependencies:

beautifulsoup4 version 4.13.4 (an easy-to-use webscraper library)
aiohttp version 3.12.12 (an async http client library)
requests version 2.32.4 (a simple http library)

To run the project using the uv virtual environment, you use:

uv run main.py

In your terminal, you should see Hello from YOUR PROJECT NAME

Submit the CLI tests while in your virtual environment. There's no penalty on failure for this lesson.