Setting up a development environment

We're going to intsall and setup the following applications to get started with developing a web app.

• VS Code
• npm
• Nodejs
• Git
• Create-react-app

1. Installing VS Code

• Windows and MacOS: Download the official package from the website and install.
• Linux: follow along this guide.

2. Installing npm and Nodejs

Installation using the Node installer is not recommended since the Node installation process installs npm in a directory with local permissions and can cause permissions errors when you run npm packages globally.

Instead use a Node version manager like nvm to install both Node.js and npm.

• Windows: download the nvm-setup.exe installer from the releases page.
• MacOS or Linux: run this install script in your terminal to install both Node and npm.

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.2/install.sh | bash

3. Installing Git

Windows:

Download the installer.

MacOS:

• If you have homebrew installed:

$ brew install git

• Or download the installer.

Linux:

Download from your distro's official repositories:

Debian / Ubuntu (apt-get)

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install git

RedHat / Fedora (dnf/yum)

$ sudo dnf install git

or

$ sudo yum install git

Arch Based Distros

$ sudo pacman -Syu git

4. Installing create-react-app

Finally install create-react-app using npm. We will use this package to generate a boilerplate react project in our next session.

$ npm install -g create-react-app

We're now ready to start developing our first website!