Displaying a loader is a common pattern in chatbots. It is used to indicate that the bot is working on something and that the user should wait.

Display a loader

Chainlit will display a loader at the message level if the message content is empty and a task is running. The idea is to send a empty message, keep the message reference in a variable and then update/stream the message content as the task progresses.

Code Example
import chainlit as cl


@cl.on_message
async def on_message(message: cl.Message):
    msg = cl.Message(content="")
    await msg.send()

    # do some work
    await cl.sleep(2)

    msg.content = f"Processed message {message.content}"

    await msg.update()