Like practically anything these days, you can also run Python in a browser. On this page, you can use my online Python interpreter. It allows you to enter Python code, run it, and see the results. All without the need to install Python and launch a Python REPL yourself. You can use this online Python interpreter while working your way through the Python tutorial for beginners.
Table of contents
Running Python in the browser
In short, If you:
- don’t feel like installing Python (yet),
- would like to get started quickly,
- first want to try if Python is for you, before installing it,
you’re in luck! You can get started right away without the need to install anything.
Please note that:
- This is a beta product
- This online Python interpreter intentionally has limited resources (see below for details)
- It’s not a REPL, it’s not interactive. You can’t use
input(). See below for more info.
Having said that, it should be enough to experiment and learn. And since you’re one of the first users, I’d love to hear your comments and questions (or rants).
Using Python in a browser is fine for learning and fiddling around. However, if you start to get serious about Python development, you will find out that, at some point, you’ll want a proper IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and a local installation of Python. I recommend installing Python on your PC if you can; it’ll offer a much better experience and it allows you to work offline too. Head over to our Python installation guide to learn how you can install Python on your computer.
The online Python interpreter
Not a REPL
Please note that this is not a REPL or interactive terminal. In this playground, you create a real Python file (playground.py), that you execute on a real computer at Python Land. So if you want to see the output, you need to use the print statement to print it. Here are a couple of examples to get you started:
print(1 + 3)
# will print 4
print('Hello world')
# will print 'Hello world'
a = 6 + 9
print(a)
# will print 15
Resource limits
You shouldn’t run into resource limits when using this Online Python Interpreter for our tutorial. If you do, it’s probably caused by one of the limits on:
- the size of the input,
- the run time of a program,
- the memory usage,
- the amount of process forks
- networking won’t work
Using modules in the online Python interpreter
You can import Python modules with this online Python interpreter. Anything that is included in the Python standard library should be usable, like the os module, threading, multiprocessing, the JSON module, CSV, etcetera.
However, you can not install external packages that would require you to use pip install. I did install some of the most often used modules, especially those that are mentioned in this tutorial. You can expect the following packages to be present:
- Numpy, scipy, sympy
- PyYAML
- Pandas
- jmespath
- python-dateutil
- pytest
Questions?
If you have any questions or comments please contact me here.
