Development Environment

This article will guide you through setting up a WinJS project development environment from scratch on your local machine.

Terminal Application

Command-line tools are now essential for modern frontend developers.

Usually, we recommend using the built-in terminal.

• For Windows, supports Command Prompt and PowerShell
• For macOS, supports the built-in terminal application Terminal

Node.js

WinJS requires Node.js for development, so please ensure that Node.js is installed on your computer with version 14 or above.

Tip

If you're a macOS user, we recommend using nvm to manage Node.js versions; Windows users are recommended to use nvm-windows.

This article will install Node.js using nvm in macOS or Linux environment:

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.1/install.sh | bash
nvm -v

0.39.1

After installing nvm, use the following commands to install Node.js:

nvm install 16
nvm use 16

After installation is complete, use the following command to check if the installation was successful and the correct version was installed:

node -v

v16.14.0

Dependency Management

After Node is installed, it comes with the npm dependency management tool, but WinJS recommends using pnpm to manage dependencies:

curl -fsSL https://get.pnpm.io/install.sh | sh -

After installation is complete, you can check if the installation was successful with the following command:

pnpm -v

7.3.0

IDE

After installing Node.js and pnpm (or other dependency management tools), you need an IDE or text editor you're comfortable with to write code. If you don't have a preferred IDE yet, you can choose one from below:

1. Visual Studio Code (Recommended)
2. WebStorm (Recommended)
3. IntelliJ IDEA
4. Sublime Text
5. Atom

Git

When developing projects using scaffolding, Git is not required, but we strongly recommend that you install and use it. Git is a very efficient and popular version control software.

Git usually comes with a Git host, such as GitHub. In this case, additional setup is required. Follow the tutorials in your Git host documentation to set up Git:

• GitHub: Set up Git
• GitLab: Installing Git
• Bitbucket: Install Git

Otherwise, follow the official installation instructions. You can download the command-line utility from the download page.

To verify successful installation, open a new terminal window and run:

$ git --version

Git GUI

Git is a command-line utility, but there are many GUI clients available. When using GitHub, we recommend GitHub Desktop. For other Git hosts, we recommend installing Sourcetree.

Next Steps

Congratulations! Your local environment is ready to start developing WinJS projects. Head over to Boilerplate to learn how to use WinJS scaffolding to quickly start a project! 🎉