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Set up your development environment

In this section, you'll create the directory for your project and set up a Python environment.

Note

This tutorial uses Python 3.14, but any recent Python version (3.10+) will work.

Create a project directory

In your terminal, go to where you want to build your project, then create a new directory, and cd into that directory:

mkdir transit-dashboard
cd transit-dashboard

Set up the Python environment

Now that you are in the transit-dashboard directory, create and activate a Python virtual environment using venv. Using a virtual environment keeps your project's dependencies isolated from other Python projects on your machine.

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1

Tip

See Python environments in VS Code for a good intro to working with Python virtual environments in VS Code.

Install the required packages

Next, install the following packages in the virtual environment:

  • requests — to fetch data from the API
  • gtfs-realtime-bindings — to parse GTFS Realtime data
  • dash — a web framework for building interactive dashboards

To install these packages, run:

pip install requests gtfs-realtime-bindings dash

Validate the environment

Run pip list and you should see a list of packages like the following that includes requests, gtfs-realtime-bindings, and dash.

Package                Version
---------------------- ---------
annotated-types        0.7.0
blinker                1.9.0
certifi                2026.6.17
charset-normalizer     3.4.9
click                  8.4.2
dash                   4.4.0
Flask                  3.1.3
gtfs-realtime-bindings 2.1.0
...