How to Build a Real-Time Chat App with Python and WebSockets

Real-time features are everywhere: live chat, notifications, collaborative editing. WebSockets make this possible, and Python makes it easy. Let's build a real-time chat application from scratch. What We're Building A simple chat room where multiple users can send and receive messages instantly — no page refresh needed. Setup pip install websockets asyncio The Server (server.py) import asyncio import websockets import json from datetime import datetime # Store connected clients connected_clients = set () async def handle_client ( websocket , path ): # Register new client connected_clients . add ( websocket ) print ( f " New client connected. Total: { len ( connected_clients ) } " ) try : async for message in websocket : data = json . loads ( message ) # Broadcast to all connected clients broadcast_message = json . dumps ({ " user " : data . get ( " user " , " Anonymous " ), " message " : data . get ( " message " , "" ), " timestamp " : datetime . now (). strftime ( " %H:%M:%S " ) }) #