What a Nice Web App

With a Raspberry Pi and the NiceGUI Python library you can build a weather station or a Pi Rover app in less than 15 lines of Python code.

- By Pete Metcalfe

The Python ecosystem is incredibly large, so it will not be unexpected that there are some excellent Python libraries that help you create web apps. Packages like Remi [1] and PySimpleGUIWeb [2] are great tools for building web apps totally in Python, and for web charting there are some solid choices like Bokeh [3] and Plotly [4].

If you're looking for an integrated Python web solution that handles both charting and displaying widgets, you might want to consider NiceGUI [5]: It lets you do everything in Python (no JavaScript or HTML required), it offers charting, chatting, data input, layout, and multi-media components, and the web server is built-in, too.

In this article, I introduce NiceGUI with two classic Raspberry Pi web projects: a Pi-based rover and a basic weather station. Both projects will include live video, and the Python scripts will contain less than 15 lines of code.

Figure 1: There are three ways to add text on a web page using NiceGUI.

Getting Started

To install the NiceGUI library on a Raspberry Pi, run pip3 install nicegui. Asa first example, I'll create a simple web page with text elements. NiceGUI gives you several options for showing text. Figure 1 presents three of the more common text options:

• Line 9 uses the ui.html method. This approach is useful if you want to cut-and-paste some existing HTML text.

• In line 12, you can see the ui.label method. The example sets two Tail-wind CSS [6] style properties to make the text bold and colored.