The latest version of this text can be found at https://info340.github.io/.

Chapter 1 Getting Setup

This course will cover a wide variety of tools and techniques used in modern web development, including different software programs that are used to write, manage, and execute the code for your web application. This chapter explains how to install and use some of the software you will need to utilize.

Note that iSchool lab machines should have all appropriate software already installed and ready to use.

In summary, you’ll need to install and set up the following software on your machine (more information below on each of these). Feel free to use alternative software, but these are the suggested programs for the course (i.e., the ones which we will provide support for):

  • Google Chrome as your web browser
  • Visual Studio Code as your code editor
  • Node.js as a JavaScript engine
  • npm as a JavaScript package manager (comes with Node.js)
  • git as a version control system (for Windows users; already installed on Macs)
  • A Bash terminal (e.g., Git Bash for Windows, or the subsystem for Linux; Terminal is already installed on Macs)
  • live-server as a local development server (simply run npm install live-server)

1.1 Web Browser

The first thing you’ll need is a web browser for viewing the web pages you make! We recommend you install and utilize Chrome, which comes with an effective set of built-in developer tools that will be especially useful in this class.

  • You can access the Chrome Developer tools by selecting View > Developer > Developer Tools from Chrome’s main menu (cmd + option + i on a Mac, ctrl + shift + i on Windows). You will pretty much always want to have these tools open when doing web development, especially when including interactivity via JavaScript.

Other modern browsers such as Firefox or Microsoft Edge will also function in this course and include their own versions of the required development tools. Note that different browsers may and will render code in different ways, which will be discussed extensively throughout the course.

1.2 Code Editors

In order to write web code, you need somewhere to write it. There are a variety of code editors and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) that are specialized for web development, providing syntax highlighting, code completion, and other useful functionality. There are lots of different code editors out there, all of which have slightly different appearances and features. You only need to download and use one of the following programs (we recommend Visual Studio Code as a default), but feel free to try out different ones to find something you like (and then evangelize about it to your friends!)

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code (or VS Code; not to be confused with Visual Studio) is a free, open-source editor developed by Microsoft—yes, really. It focuses on web programming and JavaScript, though also supports many other languages and provides a number of community-built extensions for adding even more features. Although fairly new, it is updated regularly and has has become one of our main editors for programming. VS Code is actually a stand-alone web application, so it’s written in the same HTML, CSS, and JavaScript you’ll learn in this course!

To install VS Code, follow the above link and Click the “Download” button to download the installer (e.g, .exe) file, then double-click on that to install the application.

Once you’ve installed VS Code, the trick to using it effectively is to get comfortable with the Command Palette. If you hit cmd + shift + p, VS Code will open a small dialog where you can search for whatever you want the editor to do. For example, if you type in markdown you can get list of commands related to Markdown files (including the ability to open up a preview). The Format Code option is particularly useful.

For more information about using VS Code, see the documentation, which includes videos if you find them useful. The documentation for programming in HTML, CSS, and especially JavaScript also contain lots of tips and tricks.

While we suggest using VSCode for this course, other editors are also acceptable and may be of interest to you.

Atom

Atom is a text editor built by the folks at GitHub and has been gaining in popularity. It is very similar to VS Code in terms of features, but has a somewhat different interface and community. It has a similar command-palette to VS Code. The document you are reading was authored in Atom.

Brackets

Brackets is a coding editor created by Adobe specialized for client-side web developers. It has some intriguing features that are not yet in Visual Studio Code, as well as possibly the nicest interface of this list.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is a very popular text editor with excellent defaults and a variety of available extensions (though you’ll need to manage and install extensions to achieve the functionality offered by other editors out of the box). While the software can be used for free, every 20 or so saves it will prompt you to purchase the full version. This is a great option to write a plain text file.

1.3 Bash (Command Line)

Many of the software tools used in professional web development are used on the command line: a text-based interface for controlling your computer. While the command line is harder to learn and figure out, it is particularly effective for doing web development. Command line automation is powerful and efficient enough to handle the dozens of repeated tasks across hundreds of different source files (split across multiple computers) commonly found in web programming. You will need to be comfortable using the command line in order to utilize the software for this course.

While there are multiple different command shells (command line interfaces), this course is based on the Bash shell, which provides a particular common set of commands common to Mac and Linux machines.

On a Mac you’ll want to use the built-in app called Terminal. You can open it by searching via Spotlight (hit Cmd (⌘) and Spacebar together, type in “terminal”, then select the app to open it), or by finding it in the Applications/Utilities folder.

On Windows, we recommend using Git Bash, which you should install along with git (see below). Open this program to open the command-shell. Alternatively, the 64-bit Windows 10 Anniversary update (August 2016) does include a version of an integrated Bash shell. You can access this by enabling the subsystem for Linux and then running bash in the command prompt.

  • Note that Windows does come with its own command-prompt, called the Command Prompt (previously the DOS Prompt), but it has a different set of commands and features. Powershell is a more powerful version of the Command Prompt if you really want to get into the Windows Management Framework. But Bash is more common in open-source programming like we’ll be doing, and so we will be focusing on that set of commands.

This course expects you to already be familiar with basic command line usage. For review, see The Command Line in the INFO 201 course reader.

1.4 Git and GitHub

Professional web development involves many different people working on many different files. git is a collaborative version control system that provides a set of commands that allow you to manage changes to written code, particularly when collaborating with other programmers.

You will need to download and install the software. If you are on a Mac, git should already be installed. If you are using a Windows machine, then installing git will also install the Git Bash command shell.

Note that git is a command line application: you can test that it is installed by running the command:

git --version

While git is the software used to manage versions of code, GitHub is a website that is used to store copies of computer code that are being managed with git (think “Imgur for code”).

In order to use GitHub, you’ll need to create a free GitHub account, if you don’t already have one. You should register a username that is identifiable as you (e.g., based on your name or your UW NetID). This will make it easier for others to determine out who contributed what code, rather than needing to figure out who ‘LeetDesigner2099’ is. This can be the start of a professional account you may use for the rest of your career!

This course expects you to already be familiar with utilizing Git and GitHub. For review, see Git and GitHub, Git Branches, and Git Collaboration in the INFO 201 course reader. Note that students in the INFO 343 course will be using GitHub and Pull Requests to turn in programming assignments.

1.5 Node and npm

Node.js (commonly just “Node”) is a a command line runtime environment for the JavaScript programming language—that is, a program that is used to interpret and execute programming instructions written in JavaScript. Although client-side development usually involves running JavaScript in the browser (see Chapter: JavaScript), Node provides a platform for installing and running a wide variety of “helper” programs that are frequently used in web development.

To install Node, visit the download page and select the installer for your operating system (you probably want the .msi for Windows and the .pkg for Mac). For this course you will need at least the current Long Term Support (LTS) version 8.11, so you should update Node if you installed it previously (e.g., by downloading and reinstalling it). Node is a command line application, so you can test that it is installed and available to your command shell (e.g., Terminal or Git Bash) with:

node --version

Be sure and check that you have a recent enough version!

Installing Node also installs an additional command line program called npm. npm is a package manager, or a program used to “manage” other programs—think of it as a command line “app store” for developer tools and libraries. npm is the most common way of installing and running a large number of tools used in professional web development. At the time of writing, the npm “registry” lists around 725,000 different packages.

If you have an older version of Node and npm (before Node 8.11 or npm 5.6), you will need to update them. You can re-install the latest version of Node, or just upgrade npm using the command npm install npm@latest -g. See below for an explanation of this command.

Managing packages with npm

You can use the npm program to download and install command line programs by name:

npm install -g PACKAGE-NAME

For example, you can install the live-server utility (a simple program that runs a local web server and will automatically “refresh” the browser when your code changes) using:

npm install -g live-server
  • Once the program is done installing, you can run it from the command line by using the command live-server. This program will serve all of the content from the current directory. See Chapter 2 for details.

Importantly, note the included -g option. This tells npm that the package should be installed globally, making it available across the entire computer, rather than just from a particular folder. Because you want to be able to use a command line utility like live-server from any folder (e.g., for any project), command line utilities are always installed globally with the -g option.

It is also possible to omit that option and install a package locally. For example:

npm install lodash

Will download the lodash code library (a set of useful JavaScript functions). This package will be placed into a new folder in the current project directory called node_modules/, and can be imported and used in the current directory’s code. (It’s called a local install because the package is only available to the “local” project). You will of course need to install local packages once per project.

Because node packages can be very large, and projects can have lots of them, you want to be sure to not commit the node_modules/ folder to version control. Make sure that the folder is listed in your .gitignore file!

package.json

As projects become large, it is common for them to build up many dependencies: packages that must be installed in order for the program to work. In other words, there needs to be a certain set of packages in the project’s node_modules/ folder. npm is able to keep track of these dependencies by recording them in a specialized file called package.json that can be placed inside the project directory. A package.json file is a text file containing a JSON list of information about your project. For example:

{
  "name": "example",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "private": true,
  "description": "A project with an example package.json",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "jest"
  },
  "author": "Joel Ross",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "lodash": "^4.17.4",
    "moment": "^2.18.1"
    },
  "devDependencies": {
    "html-validator": "^2.2.2"
  }
}

(You can create one of these files by using the command npm init in the current project directory, and then following the instructions to fill in the fields).

Notice that there are two packages listed under "dependencies": lodash and moment (the ^4.17.4 indicates which version of lodash). You can use npm to automatically install all of the packages listed under "dependencies" (as well as under "devDependencies") using the command:

npm install

Thus using npm install without any arguments means “install all of the requirements that have been listed for this project”. This is a good first step any time you download a project or checkout a repository from GitHub.

When installing specific packages, you can have npm automatically add them to the dependencies list by using the --save option:

npm install --save lodash

will install lodash locally, and add it to the package.json file as a dependency.

Similarly, the --save-dev option will instead save the package in the "devDependencies" list, which are dependencies needed only for development (writing the program’s code) and not for execution (running the program).

If you want to use a globally installed package in your local project (e.g., have it be a dependency but not have to download and install it again), you can use npm link to “include” the global package locally. For example, the below will allow you to use a globally installed version of lodash so you don’t have to download a copy for the project:

npm link lodash

Be sure to link any global packages before you run npm install so you don’t download any packages from package.json that you already have!

You can uninstall packages using npm uninstall, or can remove packages from the dependencies lists simply by editing the package.json file (e.g., with VS Code).

To sum up, you will use three commands with npm to install packages:

  1. npm install -g PACKAGE-NAME to globally install command line programs.
  2. npm install to locally install all of the dependencies for a project you check out.
  3. npm install --save PACKAGE-NAME to locally install a new code package and record it in the package.json file.

While npm is the most popular package manager (and the one utilized in this course), there are others as well. For example, Yarn is a package manager created by Facebook that is compatible with npm and is quickly growing in popularity. Note that you will generally need to use one package manager or other; don’t try to mix them in a single project!

Resources

Links to the recommended software are collected here for easy access: