Part 0 - Setting up a project#

Note

This tutorial is still a work-in-progress. The resources being used are tracked here. Feel free to discuss this tutorial or share your progress on the Github Discussions forum.

Starting tools#

The IDE used for this tutorial is Visual Studio Code [1] (not to be mistaken for Visual Studio).

Git will be used for version control. Follow the instructions here.

Python 3.11 was used to make this tutorial. Get the latest version of Python here. If there exists a version of Python later then 3.11 then install that version instead.

First script#

First start with a modern top-level script. Create a script in the project root folder called main.py which checks if __name__ == "__main__": and calls a main function. Any modern script using type-hinting will also have from __future__ import annotations near the top.

from __future__ import annotations

def main() -> None:
    print("Hello World!")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

In VSCode on the left sidebar is a Run and Debug tab. On this tab select create a launch.json file. This will prompt about what kind of program to launch. Pick Python, then Module, then when asked for the module name type main. From now on the F5 key will launch main.py in debug mode.

Run the script now and Hello World! should be visible in the terminal output.

Footnotes