I love making stuff in the simplest way possible. I really love reducing tooling to its simplest form. Over the last few years, I've been learning with a focus on a singular technology to deliver a complete experience. Frontend, backend, all in one. This has taken me through some fantastic frameworks, Django, TailwindCSS, and latterly a little Rails and Phoenix.

I've learned a lot from these frameworks and approaches and

This is why I was super excited to discover Pynecone. Pynecone is certainly in the early days of its development but seems as though its focus on rapid prototyping and developer-friendly approach has it off to a compelling start.

Prerequisites

To build and deploy our demo app, we'll need

• Python 3.7+, pip, venv
• node 12.22.0+
• Docker
• flyctl (I'm hosting with Fly.io, but any provider that can host a container, or static content will do)

So let's get straight into it...

Let's set up a new directory and environment for our project

mkdir pynecone-app
cd pynecone-app
python3 -m venv .
source bin/activate

Now let's add and initialize Pynecone, and create a requirements file to record the project dependencies.

pip3 install pynecone
pc init
pip3 freeze > requirements.txt

Great! ... all done! now we can run the local server and navigate to localhost:3000 and see the Pynecone landing page...

pc run

All the display logic and styling for the page is held in the pynecone_app.py. Refer to the official docs to make any changes you want, add wrapped React components if you can't achieve something out-of-the-box, or set up a SQLite database using the pc.Model ORM.

Pynecone do provide their own hosting platform, which at the time of writing is behind a waitlist. Can't wait to try deploying our app? Great, maybe fly.io can help.

We can create a Docker image of the project by adding the Dockerfile supplied by the Pynecone team to the root of our project. Ensure the requirements.txt file is in the project root as well.

We will also need to change the pcconfig.py file to accommodate running within Docker...

import pynecone as pc

config = pc.Config(
    app_name="app",
    api_url="0.0.0.0:8000",
    bun_path="/app/.bun/bin/bun",
    db_url="sqlite:///pynecone.db",
)

Now lets initialize flyctl and launch our container...

fly launch // This will take us through some guided steps to set up the project within Fly.io
fly deploy