Set Up Your Tools
A short setup checklist, and you're ready for everything else in this journey.
What you'll learn
GitHub hosts repositories online and is where issues, reviews, and pull requests happen. Git is the version control tool on your computer that talks to GitHub. A code editor is where you'll actually open and change files: any will do, but VS Code is a solid free default if you don't already have one. npm runs the practice repository's test suite in Step 6, so it's worth confirming separately from Git. You'll use a handful of Git commands later (clone, checkout, add, commit, push), each one introduced right when you need it, not all at once.
Do this
- Install Git if you don't already have it (git-scm.com has installers for every OS).
- Create a GitHub account if you don't have one.
- Install a code editor if you don't already have one. VS Code is a solid free default.
- Install Node.js if you don't already have it. This also installs npm, which you'll use in Step 6.
- Confirm Git and Node are both working.
git --version
node --version
npm --versionTry it
Run the commands above in your terminal and confirm each one prints a version number.
Check your work
git --version, node --version, and npm --version each print a version number. None of them say "command not found".