Guide: Set up Coding on Your Own Computer

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Guide to Coding on Your Own Computer

About this Guide

I’m a developer and I’ve been tutoring new coders for years, I teamed up with some other people like me to help people out with one of the top questions they ask when they’re on Codecademy – how do I do this on my own computer for real? Wanna know more about these guides (there are others), me, and why we made them? See here.

Guides

Setting up your local environment

Whatever you’re learning, you’re going to need a text editor. We recommend VS Code, you can get it set up by watching this video. If you want more options or detail, check out our guide on getting started with code.

The remaining steps for setting up on your own environment differs depending on what you’re learning, so we split up the rest by language / framework / project, click on the sub-guide to jump to what you need.

Web-based programming environment

Not quite ready to deal with the hassle of configuring everything on your own device? Not to worry, we’ve got a resource for you too. Repl.it is an online tool that can be used to spin up a development environment with the click of a button. Follow the steps below to quickly get set-up on this site.

  1. Create an account on the Repl.it site (or log in if you already have one).

  2. Once you’ve logged in, you’ll have the option to complete a quick tutorial of the application (highly recommended) or to start coding now. If you select the latter - you will be presented with a list available environments, from which you can select the one specified by your project prompt (ex. Python) to get started.
    Note: If you navigate away - not to worry! Use the top right-hand navigation bar & click on the my repls tab at any time, then use the red plus sign in the bottom right-hand corner to create a new environment.

  3. Once you select the environment you need, Repl.it will generate you a pre-configured web-based environment. If you want to rename the project - click on the pen icon in the top left-hand side of the page.

  4. On the left-hand panel, Repl.it will also allow you to create additional files & directories for your project if you need them by clicking the file & folder icons with green plus signs.

  5. To add additional packages to the environment, you can click on the cube icon on the left-hand panel, and a search bar will appear, which allows you to search for and add packages - examples might include Jquery or Bootstrap.

You can also set up Repl to be able to code collaboratively in the same editor so that you can code live with someone else just as you may do on a Google Doc. See here for more info.

Not The End

Please reply to this thread with your own resources, advice, and feedback! We made this post a wiki so it can be updated and maintained by the community just as we combined to make them in the first place, we’re just starting them off. In particular, there’s a lot of setup guides we haven’t linked here, like Angular, so we’d love your help in building this from here!

See our other guides here.

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