Setting up a JavaScript Development Environment

Welcome to the wonderful world of JavaScript development! I hope you find it enjoyable and rewarding.

The basic tools of the JS trade these days are:

• node, which runs JavaScript code.
• nvm (Node Version Manager), which updates node and lets you switch between different versions.
• yarn, a package manager for installing projects' dependencies.

Once you have these tools on your system, you will be able to download and run most JS projects, as well as create your own!

Installing nvm

See NVM on GitHub.

TL;DR you'll run a command like this:

# It's HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to copy the install command from
# https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm instead of using this one.
# Depending on when you are reading this, the NVM version
# given here may be out of date.
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.40.1/install.sh | bash

Then you'll need to close and reopen your terminal to make the nvm command available in your shell.

If command -v nvm prints nvm, you should be good to go.

Installing node

Once you have nvm, installing the latest version of node is just:

nvm install node

See nodejs.org for more info about node.

Installing yarn

node comes with its own package manager, npm, but many projects these days use an alternative, yarn.

If you installed a recent version of node, setting up yarn is as easy as running:

corepack enable

This will create a yarn executable in ~/.nvm/versions/node/v23.8.0/bin (assuming you installed node version 23.8.0). If which yarn outputs a path in that directory, it worked!

Note: the yarn executable created by corepack is actually just the installer for yarn. The first time you run a yarn command, you will be prompted with a message like:

! Corepack is about to download https://registry.yarnpkg.com/yarn/-/yarn-1.22.22.tgz
? Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

You can just hit enter to install yarn and continue.