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Setup: Prerequisites & Dependencies

Michael Mehall edited this page Oct 24, 2024 · 1 revision

This setup guide tries its best not to assume people have background knowledge, and provides basic setup instructions.

Terminal

To work on this project, you'll need a UNIX-based terminal. Mac/Linux users already have this. Windows users should install WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

WSL installation instructions. Also make sure to upgrade to version 2.

?> Tip: We recommend installing Windows Terminal for a better development experience than the Command Prompt.

Docker Desktop

  • Install Docker Desktop
  • Ensure that docker-compose was installed - run docker-compose --help in your terminal to check
    • If using Windows, ensure that WSL2 integration is enabled (WSL integration)

Fast Node Manager (fnm)

  • Install FNM - this helps manage Node versions
    • Don't install anything else yet - we'll do that in a bit

Source code

  • Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/sandboxnu/course-catalog-api
  • Change into the repo directory: cd ./course-catalog-api
  • Switch Node versions: fnm use
    • There is a file called .nvmrc in the repository, which tells fnm which version to use

Yarn

  • yarn is our package manager of choice - we use it to manage all of the dependencies we are using for this project.
  • Run npm i -g yarn
    • If you ever switch Node versions, you'll have to reinstall this (see this issue)

Github notifications

To make sure that our code gets reviewed promptly, we'll enable Scheduled Reminders for Github.

You can follow the instructions here on Github's documentation site.

Whenever you get assigned as a reviewer for a teammate's code, you'll be notified on Slack. Don't worry if these terms aren't familiar yet!