The Terminal and Installing Packages

You have your project folder open and your virtual environment created. Now you need to open a terminal inside VSCode and install Flask. This page shows you how — and what to watch for.

Opening the terminal in VSCode

Go to Terminal → New Terminal from the menu bar at the top, or press:

Ctrl + `

That is the backtick key — top-left of your keyboard, just below Esc.

Terminal menu showing New Terminal option

Wait — do not type anything yet

Here is something that catches people out the first time. After the virtual environment was created, VSCode needs a moment to activate it in the new terminal. The extensions that handle this are loading in the background — give them a few seconds.

You will see the terminal is busy, with something running or a prompt that looks plain:

Terminal loading as the virtual environment activates

Just wait. Do not type anything yet.

How to know the virtual environment is active

Once the extensions finish loading, look at the terminal prompt. When the virtual environment is active, you will see (.venv) at the very beginning — before your folder name, before everything else.

Terminal showing (.venv) prefix before the prompt

That (.venv) is VSCode telling you: you are now working inside your virtual environment. Any package you install from here goes into this project only — not globally.

If you do not see it yet, wait a few more seconds. If it still does not appear after about 30 seconds, close the terminal (Ctrl + ` to toggle) and reopen it — it should activate cleanly the second time.

Installing Flask

Once you see (.venv) in the prompt, type this and press Enter:

pip install flask

You will see Flask and its dependencies being downloaded and installed.

pip install flask running in the terminal

When it finishes and you get the prompt back, Flask is installed inside your virtual environment and ready to use.

Verify it

Run this to confirm:

pip show flask

You should see Flask's name, version, and location. The location will be a path inside your .venv folder — which confirms it is isolated to this project.

The complete picture

Here is what a properly set-up project looks like at this point:

flask-project/
│
├── .venv/            ← virtual environment (pip installs go here)
├── templates/        ← your HTML files go here
│   └── index.html
└── app.py            ← your Flask code goes here

The terminal is open, (.venv) is visible, Flask is installed. You are fully set up and ready to write your first Flask app.

Always check for (.venv) before installing

If you install packages without the virtual environment active, they go into your global Python instead. Always check for (.venv) in the prompt before running pip install. If it is not there, close and reopen the terminal.

Challenge

Open the terminal in your flask-project, wait for (.venv) to appear, then run pip install flask. When it finishes, run pip show flask and confirm the location path contains .venv somewhere in it.

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