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Development Machine Setup for Windows

Install Chocolatey

Chocolatey is a universal package manager and installer for Windows software. We will use it to install the tools and utilities we need for developing React applications.

Note: For any reason, if you don't prefer to use Chocolatey, that's ok. Just make sure that you install the other recommended packages using your preferred installation method.

Follow the steps listed below to install Chocolatey (these are based on the installation procedure described on the Chocolatey site):

  • Open PowerShell as an administrator (Click Start, type PowerShell, right-click Windows PowerShell, and then click Run as administrator.)

  • Ensure that the execution policy is not restricted. Run Get-ExecutionPolicy. If it returns Restricted, then run the following command:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

  • Wait for a few seconds for the command to complete.

  • Shut down and restart PowerShell as an administrator for the installation to take effect.

  • Type choco -? to make sure Chocolatey runs.

  • See Getting Started for usage instructions and Commands for a listing of CLI commands.

Tip: Always run Chocolatey from PowerShell running as an administrator.

Install 7-Zip

7-Zip is a good open source file archiver.

choco install 7zip -y

Install Cmder

Cmder is a great console emulator for Windows. We will use the git-for-windows version which includes all Unix commands ready in PATH so that you can use commands like git, cat and ls instantly on your machine.

choco install cmdr -y

Cmder is installed under C:\tools\cmder. Open this folder in File Explorer. You will find the Cmder executable here called Cmder.exe. Pin this executable to the taskbar for ease. Now start Cmder from the taskbar.

By default, Cmder starts at C:\tools\cmder. I prefer having it start at my home directory (e.g. D:\users<username>). Follow the steps below to do this.

  • Click on the hamburger menu (bottom right) and select Settings.
  • In the navigation bar, select Startup > Tasks.
  • Under Predefined Tasks, click on {cmd::Cmder}.
  • Click the button that says "Startup dir..."
  • Select your home directory.
  • Click on "Save Settings".

Install NVM for Windows & Node

NVM for Windows is a utility to manage multiple node.js versions. It is better than using the Node.js installer or Chocolatey because you can keep multiple versions of Node on your machine, which is very useful sometimes.

Go to the NVM for Windows repo and follow the instructions there to install it. Also install the LTS version of Node (v16.14.0 at the time of this writing).

In case you don't want to install NVM for Windows, here is the command to install Node using Chocolatey:

choco install nodejs-lts -y

Install Yarn