Overview and Node Installation

Quick reference

• 00:05 Okay, in this video we're going to start to set up our development environment.
• 00:08 The place where we write our code and do all the things.
• 00:10 So in order to install Ruby on Rails, we need several different things.
• 00:15 And we're going to spend the next few videos downloading and
• 00:17 installing those things.
• 00:18 Specifically we're going to need Node.js, and Node is the JavaScript framework,
• 00:23 it's very popular.
• 00:24 We don't even actually do anything with it,
• 00:26 it just needs to be installed on our computer.
• 00:28 We need a text editor to write our code,
• 00:30 we're going to be using the Sublime Text editor, it's completely free.
• 00:33 I should say all the tools that we're going to download are free.
• 00:36 If there's some other text editor that you like using,
• 00:38 absolutely feel free to use whatever you like.
• 00:41 That's no big deal at all.
• 00:43 We need a terminal to actually run commands.
• 00:45 So we're going to use something called the Git Bash terminal.
• 00:48 We'll talk about that in just a minute.
• 00:50 And we also need something called the Heroku Toolbelt.
• 00:53 Later on in the course, we're going to push our code up to a third party web
• 00:56 hosting company called Heroku so that it will be live online.
• 01:00 And we need the little tool to do that as well.
• 01:02 In this video, I want to spend just a couple of minutes installing Node.js,
• 01:06 and like I said, Node is the JavaScript web framework.
• 01:09 There's a good chance you've already got Node installed on your computer.
• 01:12 If you do, I recommend you uninstall it.
• 01:15 And when we start to run the installation program for Node,
• 01:18 if you've already got it on your computer,
• 01:20 it'll ask you to uninstall it and it'll uninstall it for you.
• 01:24 So go ahead and do that.
• 01:25 Getting ahead of ourselves.
• 01:26 First things first, just head over to Google and type in Node.js.
• 01:31 And the first thing that pops up is going to be the nodejs.org website.
• 01:34 You go ahead and click this,
• 01:36 and you notice it goes straight to the download page.
• 01:39 There's nothing really here to learn, we could just click the button and
• 01:41 download this.
• 01:42 So you notice there's two options here,
• 01:45 the 10.16.0 LTS, LTS stands for Long-Term Support.
• 01:51 And then there's this 12.4.0 Current.
• 01:53 Now these numbers might be a little different by the time you watch
• 01:56 this video, no big deal.
• 01:57 Just whatever the latest versions are, those are fine.
• 02:00 But the question is, which one of these do we want to download?
• 02:03 And I'm going to recommend you always download this LTS one,
• 02:07 that's the most stable version.
• 02:09 This one is probably okay, but we just want the most stable version, which is
• 02:14 always going to be this LTS one, no matter what numbers are listed in front of it.
• 02:17 So go ahead and click it.
• 02:19 Now we can save this anywhere we want,
• 02:20 I'm just going to save it to my Windows desktop here.
• 02:23 So go ahead and click Save, and it saves very quickly.
• 02:26 So you can see right down here it's finished downloading.
• 02:29 You can click it right here to install or you can navigate to your desktop and
• 02:33 just click it there.
• 02:34 But since it's right here, I'll go ahead and click it.
• 02:37 And we get this Run, and this is the screen where if you've already got Node
• 02:41 installed on your computer, it'll ask you to uninstall it.
• 02:44 It'll give you the option to and
• 02:46 I recommend that you do that because we want the most current version of Node.
• 02:50 And chances are you have Node on your computer because some other
• 02:52 program downloaded it in the background without you even knowing.
• 02:56 And when that happens it's often an old version of Node.
• 02:58 So we want to uninstall that if we can and reinstall it.
• 03:02 For us though right here, it says welcome to Node, go ahead and click Next,
• 03:06 click the license.
• 03:07 It's very basic set up, you can install it anywhere,
• 03:10 we're just going to take the default and leave all these the same.
• 03:14 And then finally just click Install.
• 03:16 And this is going to take a couple of minutes to install.
• 03:19 So I'm going to go ahead and pause the video in just a second.
• 03:21 But before I do that, I want to mention when this finishes installing,
• 03:26 it will not tell you to restart your computer.
• 03:29 But I'm telling you right now, you should absolutely restart your computer.
• 03:32 Node is just one of those things that kind of ties into everything in the background.
• 03:36 And it's just a good idea to restart your computer after you install this.
• 03:39 It'll make our life a lot easier later on.
• 03:42 When you install Ruby on Rails, oftentimes you get errors and
• 03:45 if you restart your computer right after you install Node,
• 03:49 chances of getting some of those errors are less.
• 03:52 So just keep that in mind and go ahead and restart your computer.
• 03:54 I know nobody likes to restart their computer, it's a hassle,
• 03:57 but when this is finished installing, definitely do that.
• 03:59 I'm going to go ahead and pause the video for now.
• 04:01 And we'll pick it back up as soon as this finishes installing.
• 04:04 Okay, so we've got this completed Node setup wizard message.
• 04:08 It means we've successfully installed Node and we're done.
• 04:12 We can go ahead and click Finish.
• 04:13 And that's all there is to it.
• 04:14 Node is now ready to go.
• 04:15 We don't have to do anything else to it.
• 04:17 It's completely ready and that was pretty easy.
• 04:20 So in the next video, we'll go ahead and download and install our text editor and
• 04:24 our terminal.

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