Homebrew

Ubuntu users have apt-get, Windows users have chocolatey? and Mac OS users have Homebrew. It’s easy to install and and can even be used to install non-opensource packages - like Firefox or chrome - using cask Install Homebrew by pasting this into your terminal:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Git

If we wanna maintain our sanity and our codebase then git is a must. Git will help us easily version our code and by using services like Github it’ll help us easily share our code with the world.

To install git; run git —version which will check the current version of git if you have it installed already, otherwise it’ll prompt you to install it.

VSCode

We also want an editor of some kind to help us write and edit code. There are a lot of options out there like Vim, Sublime Text or Atom to name a few. Feel free to try them if you like (I did) but I personally use Visual Studio Code.

VSCode comes with many helpful features out of the box and is updated regularly.

To install it we can either run brew cask install visual-studio-code Or head to the link and download the installer from the official website.

Hyper

A terminal can do many different things for us, we’ve already used it to install homebrew by curling.

It’s useful for running git commands, NPM commands or even text editing (if you’re using VIM) I like to use Hyper because it looks nice and is built on web technologies.

We can install it by running: brew cask install hyper Or hitting that link above this paragraph.

Node and NPM

NPM is a package manager which means it’s like homebrew but for Javascript packages. It’s included with Node.js so once that is installed, NPM will become available for us.

Run this to install node: brew install node Check if it installed correctly by running: node -v And npm -v

All done!

create-react-app

We’re now ready to get our hands and editor dirty.

Create-react-app is boilerplate provided by Facebook, it comes with a bunch of technologies and is ready to use out of the box to help us focus on coding instead of fiddling with Javascript tooling. Some of the included technologies is obviously React and JSX.

We can create a new app by running:

npx create-react-app my-app
cd my-app
npm start

Cheers 🍻