Installing RASA Pro | Setting up your Development Environment

Learn how to install RASA Pro and set up your development environment. A step-by-step guide to getting started with building AI-powered chatbots.

Prerequisites

1. Development Machine: Either Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu.

Installation and Setup using Python

RASA Pro has a python package named rasa-pro that can be installed locally.

Setup your Python Environment

Check if Python is already installed in your development machine. You can check by running below commands on your terminal or command prompt:

python --version
pip --version

Some machines might not recognize python --version. Use python3 --version instead.

PYTHON SUPPORTED VERSIONS
Rasa supports Python 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11.

If Python is already installed, you will get the version numbers from above 2 commands. If python version do not match with the supported RASA versions or python not installed, then proceed below to install them.

Ubuntu

Fetch the relevant packages using apt, and install virtualenv using pip.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-dev python3-pip

macOS

Before proceeding to Python installation, install the Homebrew package manager. Once installation done, proceed with Python3 installation.

brew update
brew install python

Windows

Install Python 3 (64-bit version) for Windows. Make sure to install only the supported versions for Rasa Pro. After that you can install pip.

pip3 install -U pip

Setup your Python Virtual Environment

It is highly recommended to isolate your python projects. It helps install packages only for specific environment and python project helps isolate and not affect your other projects.

Below commands with respect to their operating system will help you create a new virtual environment and activate it.

Ubuntu/macOS

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

Windows

python -m venv ./venv
.\venv\Scripts\activate

Visual Studio Code

Open VS Code on your developer machine. Click on View on top and select Command Palette…

Search for Python and from the search results, select Python: Create Environment… You will only get this option if you python installed on your machine. If you still do not get this option, you can use your terminal to create a new environment and activate it. Follow this tutorial to know How to Create a New Python Environment and Activate it in Windows OS?.

Select the Environment type. I usually go with Venv. It will be your preference, what do you use.

Select a Python installation to create the virtual environment. I will go with the latest version of Python. At the time of writing this blog, the latest version is Python 3.13.2. Once selected, it will create a new virtual environment in your current workspace or directory.

This is how it looks like in the file explorer. A new folder with name .venv is created.

Open a new terminal in VS Code. If you see .venv written before the path, then it confirms that your python virtual environment is successfully created and it also activated.

Now, if you install any package/libraries, it will get installed in your virtual environment and will not affect or create conflict in your other projects.

Install Rasa Pro

You can install Rasa Pro with either pip or uv. Below command installs Rasa Pro using pip.

pip install rasa-pro

To speed up the installation process, alternatively you can also use uv package manager.

pip install uv
uv pip install rasa-pro

Thank you All!!! Hope you find this useful.