How to Create a Python Project: Step by Step Guide

To create a simple Python project with dependencies, you need to set up a virtual environment, define your dependencies in a requirements.txt file, and write your code in main.py. This approach ensures project dependencies are isolated and easily installable on any system. 

Project Setup Steps

1. Create a Project Directory

Open your terminal or command prompt and create a new directory for your project, then navigate into it:

mkdir simple-python-project
cd simple-python-project

2. Create and Activate a Virtual Environment

A virtual environment keeps your project’s dependencies separate from other Python projects.

Create Virtual Environment:

python -m venv venv

Activate the environment:

# macOS/Linux
source venv/bin/activate

# Windows
.\venv\Scripts\activate

You should see (venv) at the beginning of your terminal prompt, indicating the environment is active.

(venv) D:\python\simple-python-project> 

3. Create the requirements.txt file

This file lists the external libraries your project needs. For this example, we will use the requests library to make an HTTP request and python-dotenv to load configuration from .env i.e. the environment file.
Create a file named requirements.txt in your project root and add the following line:

requests
python-dotenv

4. Install Dependencies

With your virtual environment activated, install the packages listed in requirements.txt:

(venv) D:\python\simple-python-project> pip install -r requirements.txt

5. Create main.py

Create the main application file named main.py and add some Python code that uses the installed dependency:

import os
import requests
import sys
from dotenv import load_dotenv

# 1. Load variables from the .env file
load_dotenv()

def main():
    
    # 2. Get the API URL from environment variables
    api_url = os.getenv("API_URL")

    print(f"Attempting to fetch data from: {api_url}")

    if not api_url:
        print("Error: API_URL not found in .env file.")
        return
    
    try:
        response = requests.get(api_url)
        response.raise_for_status()

        data = response.json()
        
        # GitHub events return a list; we check if it's not empty
        if isinstance(data, list) and len(data) > 0:
            print(f"Successfully fetched {len(data)} events.")
            # Note: Not all events have an 'action' key, using .get() for safety
            action = data[0].get('payload', {}).get('action', 'N/A')
            print(f"First event payload snippet (action): {action}")
        else:
            print("Fetched data, but it wasn't in the expected list format.")

    except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
        print(f"An error occurred: {e}")
        sys.exit(1)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

This script safely reach out to the internet, grab specific data, and show it to you.

6. Create Environment Variables

Create a .env file. This file is used to store secrets like API keys, API endpoints etc. We’ll add the API URL here to show how to load external config.

API_URL=https://api.github.com/events

7. Run the Project

(venv) D:\python\simple-python-project> python main.py

You will see output confirming that the requests library successfully made the web request.

# Output
Attempting to fetch data from: https://api.github.com/events
Successfully fetched 30 events.
First event payload snippet (action): N/A

Important Note:

If the .env file contains secret API keys, we should add it in .gitinore file to prevent check-in.

.env

Project Structure Summary

Your final project directory structure will look like this:

simple-python-project/
├── .venv/               # Virtual environment
├── .env                 # API configuration & secrets
├── .gitignore           # Files to exclude from Git
├── main.py              # Main execution logic
├── README.txt           # Project instructions
└── requirements.txt     # List of dependencies