Installing FastAPI

## Introduction

FastAPI is a modern, easy-to-use, high-performance, web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints. It's highly efficient and perfect for building complex, data-driven web applications. Let's begin by installing FastAPI on your machine.

## Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have the following installed:

- Python 3.6 or higher: FastAPI is based on Python 3.6+ type hints. You can download it from the [official Python website](https://www.python.org/downloads/).

- pip: It's a package installer for Python. It comes pre-installed with Python 3.4+.

## Installing FastAPI

FastAPI can be installed using pip. Open your terminal or command prompt, and run the following command:

```bash
pip install fastapi

This command will fetch the FastAPI package from the Python package index (PyPI) and install it on your local machine.

Installing Uvicorn

FastAPI is a web framework and to serve our applications, we need an ASGI server. Uvicorn is an ASGI server that works well with FastAPI. To install Uvicorn, run the following command:

pip install uvicorn

Verifying the Installation

To verify if FastAPI and Uvicorn are installed correctly, run the following commands:

fastapi --version
uvicorn --version

If both commands return a version number, it means FastAPI and Uvicorn are installed successfully.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You have successfully set up the FastAPI environment on your machine. In the coming sections, you'll learn how to create your first FastAPI application. Remember, the key to mastering FastAPI, like any other framework or language, is constant practice and experimentation. So, let's dive in and start building web apps with FastAPI!