# Getting Started with Potato in 5 Minutes

Source: https://www.potatoannotator.com/blog/getting-started-5-minutes

This tutorial gets you from nothing to a running annotation task in about five minutes. We'll build a small sentiment analysis task, which is enough to see how the pieces fit together.

## Step 1: Install Potato

Install it with pip:

```bash
pip install potato-annotation
```

Verify the installation:

```bash
potato --version
```

## Step 2: Create Your Configuration

Create a file called `config.yaml` with this minimal configuration:

```yaml
annotation_task_name: "Quick Start Sentiment Analysis"

# Your data file
data_files:
  - data.json

# Annotation interface
annotation_schemes:
  - annotation_type: radio
    name: sentiment
    description: "What is the sentiment of this text?"
    labels:
      - Positive
      - Negative
      - Neutral
```

## Step 3: Create Sample Data

Create a `data.json` file with some sample texts:

```json
{"id": "1", "text": "I love this product! It's amazing!"}
{"id": "2", "text": "Terrible experience. Would not recommend."}
{"id": "3", "text": "The weather is partly cloudy today."}
{"id": "4", "text": "Best purchase I've ever made!"}
{"id": "5", "text": "This is the worst service I've encountered."}
```

## Step 4: Start Annotating

Launch the annotation server:

```bash
potato start config.yaml
```

Then open `http://localhost:8000` in your browser and you'll see the annotation interface:

![Potato annotation interface](/images/blog/sentiment-analysis.png)

## Step 5: Label Your Data

1. Log in with any username (Potato creates accounts automatically)
2. Read the text displayed
3. Select the appropriate sentiment label
4. Click "Submit" to save and move to the next item

## Step 6: Export Your Annotations

Your annotations are automatically saved to the `annotation_output/` folder. Each annotator's work is saved in a separate file.

To view your annotations:

```bash
cat annotation_output/your_username.jsonl
```

## Where to go next

That's a working annotation task. From here you can add keyboard shortcuts so labeling goes faster, dress up the interface with instructions, tooltips, and validation, bring in multiple annotators with user management and quality control, or try the other annotation types: spans, checkboxes, Likert scales, and the rest. The [documentation](/docs) covers each of these in depth, and the [showcase](/showcase) has full configs you can copy from. For a more detailed walkthrough of this setup, see the [quick start guide](https://github.com/davidjurgens/potato/blob/master/docs/quick-start.md).

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*Having trouble? Check our [FAQ](/faq) or open an issue on [GitHub](https://github.com/davidjurgens/potato/issues).*