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Installation

Get up and running with the Ascender Framework in a few minutes.

Prerequisites

  • Python 3.11 or higher — the framework leverages modern Python features and optimizations.
  • Poetry — Ascender manages project dependencies through Poetry.

Poetry virtual environments

Make sure Poetry is configured to create a virtual environment for each project:

poetry config virtualenvs.create true

Install the framework

  1. Install Poetry (if not already installed):

    pip install poetry

  2. Install the Ascender Framework CLI:

    pip install ascender-framework

  3. Verify the installation:

    ascender -h

    This should display the available CLI commands.

Create your first project

Scaffold a new project with the new command:

ascender new --name my-app
cd my-app

By default the project is set up with the SQLAlchemy ORM. Prefer Tortoise?

ascender new --name my-app --orm tortoise

The generated project looks like this:

my-app/
├── ascender.json          # framework configuration
├── pyproject.toml         # dependencies, managed by Poetry
└── src/
    ├── main.py            # application entry point
    ├── bootstrap.py       # providers: router, database, docs
    ├── routes.py          # route table
    └── settings.py        # project settings

Run the development server

ascender run serve

Your API is now live at http://127.0.0.1:8000 — with interactive OpenAPI docs at /docs. The server hot-reloads on code changes.

Need a different host or port?

ascender run serve -H 0.0.0.0 -p 8080

Next steps