Setting up the Development Environment

Now that the computer is ready and I basically know how to handle the Ubuntu OS, it's time to install everything I need for development.

First thing is to sudo apt get update to see if the system is up to date.

Installing Git is as simple as:

sudo apt install git

📱 Installing NVM and Node

NVM is short for "Node Version Manager". Without it, you can only use one version of Node at a time on your computer. Switching to a different one would require to re-install a different version of Node, so I'll try NVM, just to stay flexible.

To run the install script, you need either wget or curl (read more about the differences here: wget vs. curl - What is the difference?):

sudo apt install wget
# or
sudo apt install curl

Following the instructions from the NVM Github Repo to download the install script (the latest version is 0.38.0):

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.38.0/install.sh | bash

Checking the installation (restart the terminal if you get a message "command not found"):

nvm --version
0.38.0

Installing Node

To get a (LONG) list of all available Node versions:

nvm ls-remote

You can specify the version to install, or grab the latest LTS release:

nvm install --lts

Checking the installation:

node -v
v14.17.3

Printing the list of versions again, you'll see your version coloured in green with a little arrow pointing a it:

Setting the latest LTS version as default for every new shell:

nvm use --lts

It doesn't make much sense with only one version installed, but installing a second version only for the sake of learning more NVM commands doesn't make sense to me at this point either.

📱 Installing Visual Studio Code

VS Code isn't available in the standard Ubuntu repositories, so you can't just sudo apt install it, but you need a few extra command lines (I followed this guide (How to Install Visual Studio Code)):

# install dependencies
sudo apt install software-properties-common apt-transport-https wget

# download a key from Microsoft
wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

# enable the repository
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/vscode stable main"

# ... and install
sudo apt install code

If you prefer, there's also a VS Code Snap Package.

Extensions

I'm not very fancy about my editor, just a few basic extensions that probably 90% of people are using as well, and a little configuration:

{
  "workbench.colorTheme": "Super One Dark",
  "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode",
  "prettier.singleQuote": true,
  "editor.formatOnSave": true,
  "editor.hover.enabled": false,
  "liveSassCompile.settings.formats": [
    {
      "format": "expanded",
      "extensionName": ".css",
      "savePath": null
    }
  ]
}

Having this out of the way, it's time to start building 🏗️

📱 Resources

Installing Node.js Tutorial: Using NVM

📱 Thanks for reading!

If you find any errors or have additions, questions or just want to say hi, please leave a comment below, or get in touch via my website jsdisco.dev or Twitter.
Keep calm & code 👋