* There can be **multiple processes** of the **same program** running at the same time.

If you check out the "task manager" or "system monitor" (or similar tools) in your operating system, you will be able to see many of those processes running.

Including external libraries also based on Pydantic, as <abbr title="Object-Relational Mapper">ORM</abbr>s, <abbr title="Object-Document Mapper">ODM</abbr>s for databases.

## About proxies with a stripped path prefix

Keep in mind that a proxy with stripped path prefix is only one of the ways to configure it.

Probably in many cases the default will be that the proxy doesn't have a stripped path prefix.

{!../../../docs_src/first_steps/tutorial001.py!}
```

You can return a `dict`, `list`, singular values as `str`, `int`, etc.

You can also return Pydantic models (you'll see more about that later).

There are many other objects and models that will be automatically converted to JSON (including ORMs, etc). Try using your favorite ones, it's highly probable that they are already supported.

## Recap

* Import `FastAPI`.

---

"_Honestly, what you've built looks super solid and polished. In many ways, it's what I wanted **Hug** to be - it's really inspiring to see someone build that._"

<img src="/img/tutorial/websockets/image02.png">

And your **FastAPI** application with WebSockets will respond back:

<img src="/img/tutorial/websockets/image03.png">

You can send (and receive) many messages:

<img src="/img/tutorial/websockets/image04.png">

And all of them will use the same WebSocket connection.

## Using `Depends` and others

---

"_Honestly, what you've built looks super solid and polished. In many ways, it's what I wanted **Hug** to be - it's really inspiring to see someone build that._"

FastAPI uses a standard for building Python web frameworks and servers called <abbr title="Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface">ASGI</abbr>. FastAPI is an ASGI web framework.

The main thing you need to run a **FastAPI** application (or any other ASGI application) in a remote server machine is an ASGI server program like **Uvicorn**, this is the one that comes by default in the `fastapi` command.

There are several alternatives, including:

# Settings and Environment Variables

In many cases your application could need some external settings or configurations, for example secret keys, database credentials, credentials for email services, etc.

Most of these settings are variable (can change), like database URLs. And many could be sensitive, like secrets.

For this reason it's common to provide them in environment variables that are read by the application.

## Environment Variables

!!! tip

For example, there's an official <a href="https://hub.docker.com/_/python" class="external-link" target="_blank">Python Image</a>.

And there are many other images for different things like databases, for example for: