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:

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

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

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 :)
  • Which Python versions does PythonAnywhere support?

I'm a teacher looking to use PythonAnywhere for education

Welcome! We have lots of teachers and students on board. Check out this page for an overview of our education-specific features:

Or you can run through this step-by-step tutorial if you prefer:

trophy icon   I want to check out the Education Beta features [account in US servers] [account in EU servers]

A few other topics

Some older/miscellaneous guides

Files:

Consoles:

Web apps:

Databases:

Scheduled tasks (similar to cron):

Other Languages:

A few other step-by-step guides

fishies icon   I want to follow the Django Tutorial [account in US servers] [account in EU servers]

cloud icon   I want to create a web application [account in US servers] [account in EU servers]

github icon   I want to clone and hack on my GitHub project [account in US servers] [account in EU servers]

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