Installing Python packages with pip

As we said earlier, pip is the built-in Python package manager that will help us install third-party libraries. To get started, let's install FastAPI and Uvicorn:

$ pip install fastapi uvicorn[standard]

We'll talk about it in later chapters, but Uvicorn is required to run a FastAPI project.

Tip

You have probably noticed the word standard inside square brackets just after uvicorn. Sometimes, some libraries have sub-dependencies that are not required to make the library work. Usually, they are needed for optional features or specific project requirements. The square brackets are here to indicate that we want to install the standard sub-dependencies of uvicorn.

To make sure the installation worked, we can open a Python interactive shell and try to import the FastAPI package:

$ python
>>> from fastapi import FastAPI

If it passes without any errors, congratulations, FastAPI is installed and ready to use!