Development Environment Setup
Here I will go through the recommended programs, tools, etc. to develop LATE. These are based on what I (Frank) use after experimenting with different methods and editors and consulting recommended practices for our stack.
I 100% prefer working on Linux for LATE due to the absolute ease of installing node, editors, and other necessary tools. I recommend Ubuntu 19.04 but other beginner friendly distros like Mint will be easy to work with.
If you are working on Windows, you really really really should use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to use Linux tools from the command line. Its easy to setup and makes development a thousand times easier than working with native Windows. You will be slightly limited with code editors as they sometimes don't recognize programs installed on WSL and require you to double install programs (once on Windows and once on WSL).
I haven't used a Macbook for web development yet so I'm not too sure about how well this would work.
All of LATE, the server on the backend and the frontend uses NodeJS, the JavaScript runtime environment that runs JS outside of the browser.
Installation Options
- Official NodeJS website Recommended for Windows since it has an installer
- Node Version Manager (nvm) Recommended for Linux/Mac since it allows you to manage multiple versions of Node and easily update and switch
LATE development is smoothest and easiest with Visual Studio Code (VSCode) and some handy plugins. Atom also works well but I have found it to be slightly slower and support the technologies LATE uses a little worse.
You can use git from the command line or from free GUI clients such as GitHub Desktop. GitHub Desktop is recommended if you are new to git.
To work on LATE, you'll need the files on your computer!
Because LATE connects to a database, Google APIs, and other similar services, there are many passwords and secret keys that cannot be included in the public repository but are required for LATE to run. All of these are kept in one place, in a file called .env in the root folder of the project. You will not find this anywhere publicly (hopefully!).
The content of the .env file is different for development mode and production mode. You will use the .env file with the development mode passwords/secrets from me (Frank). I will send you the file privately once you join the team.
Sometimes new passwords/secrets are needed when new features are added, I will alert the team about these and distribute the updated .env.
When developing LATE, you must run the server (backend) separately from the frontend. These are easily done with two npm commands.
Open two terminals and enter $ npm run backend in one and $ npm run frontend in the other. If nothing goes wrong, the frontend terminal should give you the link to where the website is running!
frontend on left, backend on right
Above we can see that to visit the website we navigate to http://localhost:8080/ in your browser!
Use either Chrome or Firefox and install the vue-devtools extension for either browser.