Welcome to lesson 3!
First things first, we have to set up the development environment! You don’t know how just yet? It’s okay, we’ll show you which software or packages you will need to set up your own development environment! This lesson will be short and easy, so it won’t take a lot out of your time! To find out more, check out the video or read the article below!
Hi, guys! Welcome to lesson three. Setting up the development environment. In this lesson, I will discuss the software packages that we need to install for this course. In the following videos, I will discuss and show how to install these software packages either on Macintosh, Linux, or Windows.
Node.js
The first package that we need to install is Node.js.Node.js is simply a JavaScript runtime environment. As you probably know JavaScript was originally designed to be used as a client-side programming language but eventually some people decided that we wanted to use JavaScript for server-side programming and that’s what node.js enables us to do.
NPM
The second software packages we need is NPM and it stands for Node Package Manager and that’s exactly what it is and it will enable us to download some node packages in a very convenient and easy manner.
Truffle
The third software package that we will install today is Truffle and it’s just a development environment, testing, framework, and asset pipeline for Ethereum. It makes our lives as Ethereum smart contract developers easier.
Geth
The fourth software package that we will install is GETH or Go Ethereum in its full name and what it is. It’s a command-line interface for running a full Ethereum node. Basically, it enables us to do everything that a real live Ethereum node is capable of doing such as transferring funds, mining blocks, inspecting block history, creating accounts, and anything else that is possible on a live Ethereum node. It also allows us to create our own private network which enables us to fully test our application before deploying it to the live network. Keep in mind that GETH can also be used to connect to actual live Ethereum node which we will also do later of course.
testrpc
The fifth package that we need to install is testrcp and ‘testrcp’ is a node.js based Ethereum client for testing and development of smart contracts. Keep in mind that’s only an emulator of an Ethereum node not a real node like GETH. First blocks mining and other operations are almost instantaneous, notably, it uses in-memory mechanism for storage, not space on the disk-like GETH does, meaning that all the changes that you do on the blockchain have gone once the node is stopped.
So this is it, these are the 5 packages that we will install. Now search for the video which corresponds to the platform that you use and follow the instructions.
