The PythonAnywhere help pages

Many of your questions about PythonAnywhere are likely to be answered below. If not, the best place to get support is in our Forums and EU 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.

We also have a page that lists books and courses the people have recommended to us here.

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:

keyboard icon I want to start learning Python [account in US servers] [account in EU servers]

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

computer icon I have built a web app on my local PC and want to deploy it on PythonAnywhere [account in US servers] [account in EU servers]

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

Can I use FTP/Filezilla? How should I upload my code to PythonAnywhere?
Debugging import errors and sys.path issues in your WSGI file
Using a virtualenv for your web app
How to use a custom domain for your web app (including CNAME setup)
How to set up an HTTPS/SSL certificate for a custom domain
How to force HTTPS on your web app
Troubleshooting DNS problems
How to use our static files service, and why you might want to
How to set environment variables in web apps
How to handle slow/async work in a web app
How to point a new domain at an existing web app in the Web tab
How to move a domain from one PythonAnywhere user account to another
Using MySQL (including using MySQL with Python 3)
I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway error. How can I debug?
My site is slow!
How to host a static site on PythonAnywhere
Using International Domain Names -- that is, ones with non-ASCII/Unicode characters in them
How do I create a web app that redirects from one domain to another?
How many hits can my site handle? -- a guide to making sure that you have the right number of worker processes

And some tips for specific web frameworks:

Django
- Deploying an existing Django project on PythonAnywhere
- How can I use a more recent version of Django for a new project
- How to setup static files under Django -- STATIC_ROOT in settings.py, collectstatic, etc
- The Django admin's CSS isn't working
- How to set SECRET_KEY via an environment variable
- How to scale a Django Application on PythonAnywhere with Memcache (external link to Memcachier)
Flask
Web2Py
Others

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¶

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 (account in US servers; account in EU servers). There's more information about the error log here.

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.
Dealing with "there was an error reloading your web app" messages
I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway error. How can I debug?
I'm getting a 400 Bad Request error from my Django app
Debugging problems with static files (js, css) not loading
Fixing "OperationalError: 2006 MySQL server has gone away"
Fixing "OperationalError: 1226 User has exceeded the max_user_connections resource
I'm seeing lots of GeneratorExit errors in my error log

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

PythonAnywhere already has many of the Python modules that you might want to use installed. There is a complete list of them available on our Batteries included page

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? It's not built in, but from a paid account you can use an external service like mLab. Some extra hints and tips on using Mongo here.
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
How do I reload my webapp automatically? You can now use our API for this :)