---
title: 'Quickstart'
description: 'Start building with Honcho in under 5 minutes'
icon: 'bolt'
---

To make things easy, there's an instance of Honcho up and running on a demo
server at [https://demo.honcho.dev](https://demo.honcho.dev/docs). The python
package defaults to this instance, so let's dive into how to get up and
running!


Install the Honcho client SDK with the following command:
```bash
pip install honcho-ai
```
Alternatively, if you're using [Poetry](https://python-poetry.org/), run:
```bash
poetry add honcho-ai
```

Let's walk through simple Python steps. First, import the `Client` from the package:

```python
from honcho import Honcho
```

Next, we want to register an application with the Honcho client:
```python
from uuid import uuid4

app_name = str(uuid4())  # random int for the app_name, but this can be any string
honcho = Honcho(app_name=app_name)
honcho.initialize()
```

This will create an application with the above name if it does not already exist or retrieve it if it does. After we have our application
initialized, we can make a user with the following:

```python
user_name = str(uuid4())  # random int for the user_name, but this can be anything, should be unique for each user
user = honcho.create_user(user_name)
```

Now let's create a session for that application. Honcho is a user context management system, so you can create sessions for users. Thus, a `user_id` is required.
```python
session = user.create_session()
```

Let's add a user message and an AI message to that session:
```python
user_input = "Here's a message!"
ai_response = "I'm a helpful assistant!"

session.create_message(is_user=True, content=user_input)
session.create_message(is_user=False, content=ai_response)
```

You can also easily query Honcho to get the session objects for that user with the following:
```python
sessions = list(user.get_sessions_generator())
session = sessions[0]  # gets the most recent session for that user
```

And finally you can get the messages within a session with the following:
```python
messages = list(session.get_messages_generator())
```

This is a super simple overview of how to get up and running with the Honcho SDK. We covered the basic methods for reading and writing from the hosted storage service. Next, we'll cover alternative forms of hosting Honcho.

For a more detailed look at the SDK check out the SDK reference [here](https://api.python.honcho.dev/).