The PythonAnywhere help pages | PythonAnywhere help

Many of your questions about PythonAnywhere are likely to be answered below. If not, the best place to get support is in our Forums. We monitor them to make sure that every question gets answered, and you get the added benefit that other PythonAnywhere customers can help you out too. They're also a nice place for a chat :-)

If you want, you can access an even broader group of people by asking your questions on StackOverflow; we check all posts there tagged with pythonanywhere daily, and reply if no-one else has already solved the problem.

But if you want to ask your questions in private and get responses over email, you can use the "Send feedback" link at the top of any page on PythonAnywhere. We'll be alerted and will get back to you ASAP. You can also email us directly via support@pythonanywhere.com

If you want help about Python programming generally (as opposed to PythonAnywhere), you can buy 1:1 live Python help at Codementor.

The help pages have the following sections -- hopefully you can jump straight to one that describes what you're looking for help with!

I'm a beginner learning Python

We have lots of beginners on PythonAnywhere! Here's a very quick step-by-step tutorial you might want to start with:

I want to start learning Python

And here are some common questions and guides for beginners:

I've got an existing web app that I'm trying to deploy

This section assumes you have started building a web app on your local PC, and you're now looking to deploy it to PythonAnywhere.

Here is a step-by-step tutorial that walks you through the general outline of how to set up an existing web app on PythonAnywhehre

I have built a web app on my local PC and want to deploy it on PythonAnywhere

And here are some popular how-to guides and help pages for common webapp issues:

And some tips for specific web frameworks:

I'm looking at an error message in a console

Oh no! Here's our most common explanations and solutions to console problems:

Some technical problems with consoles that sometimes come up:

I'm looking at an error message in my web app

Oh no! But fear not -- the likelihood is that we've seen someone else with this error before, and we know how to fix it.

If you haven't already, the first step is to look in your error log -- you'll find a link to it on the Web tab.

Once you've done that, here are some solutions to common problems

Debugging import errors and sys.path issues <-- if you've just started setting up your app, chances are the answer is in here.
I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway error. How can I debug?
I'm getting a 400 Bad Request error from my Django app
Fixing "OperationalError: 2006 MySQL server has gone away"
Fixing "OperationalError: 1226 User has exceeded the max_user_connections resource

I'm trying to figure out how to get a particular tool or feature to work

Here are some guides for some of the common things people want to do:

And here's some very brief FAQ answers about common requests:

Can I use MongoDB? Only via an external service like mongolabs
Can I use an external MySQL service? Probably not (on a free account), unless they have an HTTP api.
Can I use Redis? Again, only via an external service like redislabs. Although you can use redislite
Can I use websockets, or run my own socket server? I'm afraid not -- we only support Python apps that implement the WSGI protocol