Browse docs
All docs

Start Here

Setup

Your First Project

Make It Yours

Ship

No matching docs.

Setup

Run It on Your Computer

One setup script, then one command. Sign up, confirm your email from the terminal, and open the admin panel.

Updated Oct 2026
On this page

You need Git, and that is it. No Docker, no Node, and you do not have to install Python yourself. The setup script installs uv if it is missing, and uv downloads Python 3.13 for this project.

1. Run the setup script

Open a terminal in your project folder (C:\code\myapp).

Windows (PowerShell):

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File scripts/setup.ps1

macOS / Linux:

bash scripts/setup.sh

It installs the Python packages, creates .env with a fresh secret key, downloads the Tailwind CSS tool once, creates the database (SQLite, a single file), and installs the git hooks. It ends with Done. Start the app with: uv run poe dev.

How long it took for us: 237 seconds on Windows with nothing cached (it installs about 470 MB the first time), 98 seconds on a second run, and 243 seconds on a bare Linux machine where uv and Python were installed from nothing.

Red text on Windows?

Windows PowerShell 5.1 can print a red NativeCommandError while packages install, because uv writes its progress to the error stream. If the script ends with Done, everything worked.

2. Start the app

uv run poe dev

This starts the web server and the CSS watcher. Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser. The first page answered 15 seconds after the command in our test.

To stop it, press Ctrl+C in the terminal. Next time, the same command starts it again, and it applies new database migrations first.

3. Sign up and confirm your email

  1. Open http://localhost:8000/account/signup/, enter an email and a password.
  2. The app asks you to verify your email:
The Verify Your Email Address page after signing up
Email verification is on from the start, as in production.
  1. On your computer, emails are printed in the terminal instead of being sent. Find the message in the terminal running uv run poe dev, copy the link that contains /account/confirm-email/, and open it.
  2. Confirm, and you land in the app:
The signed-in app shell with its sidebar
/app/, where your product's pages will live. The name and colors are placeholders you change later.

4. Open the admin panel

The panel is for you, the owner. Create your owner account from .env:

  1. Open .env in the project folder and fill in SUPERUSER_EMAIL and SUPERUSER_PASSWORD.
  2. Run uv run poe bootstrap.
  3. Sign in with that email and password, then open http://localhost:8000/panel/.

The panel asks you to set up two-factor before it opens. Scan the code with an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, 1Password, Authy) and save the recovery codes.

The panel asking for two-factor authentication
Two-factor is required for the panel by default. You can switch that off in the panel's settings, but we would not.

5. Look around

  • http://localhost:8000/ar/ is the Arabic version, right to left:
The landing page in Arabic, laid out right to left
Arabic ships translated. Every page you build gets it too.
  • http://localhost:8000/styleguide/ shows the UI components (45 of them ship in templates/cotton/).
  • http://localhost:8000/pricing/ answers 404, on purpose: nothing is on sale yet. Sell It With Stripe turns it on.

The path is too long?

If the setup script stops with a warning about a long path, move the project to C:\code\myapp and run it again. That is the Windows 260-character limit, explained in Get the Code.

Next: Open It in Claude Code.

Stop wiring plumbing. Start describing your product.

A Django SaaS starter written for Claude Code: accounts, Stripe billing with credits, an admin panel, jobs, email, AI and a Coolify deploy, finished and tested. You describe the product.

Get it for $49 →