Setting Up Your Local Development Environment

Everyone, this is Sebastian, Product Manager over here at 8base. Today I'm going to be taking you through a quick tutorial showing you how to set up your local development environment to develop custom functions on 8base. Now 8base is a low code software development tool, both for front end and back end.

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It's really amazing the things that you can accomplish using our cloud hosted tools such as the back end console or the app builder editor. However, at times, you have to extend your back end using custom code, which we allow you to do by authoring and deploying serverless functions or Lambda functions behind the scenes.

Now I'm going to quickly show you how to get Node.js Installed, use npm, and then create your first 8base functions package so that you have no problem at all getting started on actually extending your custom back end to do all the amazing things that your project demands. Let's jump right into it. The first thing that you're going to want to do is go to Node.js.org and go to their downloads page, whatever machine that you're on; Windows, Mac OS, or potentially another one, you should be able to find the installer that you need to install Node.js on your computer.

I'm going to go ahead and click the Mac installer. Give it a minute for that package to download. Awesome. Once downloaded, I'm going to go ahead and open it. Just go through the installer, choosing the default options. I recommend, if you don't know what the options are, just to accept the defaults. If you do, go ahead and customize it however you need to. Now once everything goes through and installs. Awesome. I can now close that move to the trash and we are good.

Now the next thing is you are going to need to use a terminal. Whether you use the integrated terminal and the VS Code, something like iTerm2 or whatever terminal that you prefer to use, that's great. Just make sure that you have terminal. Personally, I'm going to use iTerm2 in this tutorial I'm going to open up iTerm and I have a new terminal window here. Awesome.

Now if I run node- v, I can see that we successfully sold node or the latest version of Node, which seems to be 16.13.2. Now by installing Node, it's also installed npm on my machine, which is something that we really need, npm -v. npm is the Node package manager, which is essentially going to allow us to install in our projects any open source or private npm package that we want to leverage inside our custom functions that we deploy.

We can go ahead and now install the 8base command line by running npm install 8base-cli -g. Just give it a quick minute to install. Awesome. Now with the 8base command line installed, we're going to quickly authenticate the command line by running 8base login. This is going to redirect it to our browser where if you're already logged into 8base it will just authenticate automatically as I was.

However, if you weren't logged into your 8base account, just go ahead and log in; the same screen will pop up for you. Now once done I'm going to close that window, navigate back to my terminal. Now my 8base command line is authenticated and I'm ready to start developing.

We are currently working on tutorials to show you all the different use cases and ways that you can use functions. However, there's already a couple of hours of video content on YouTube and great documentation that we have that shows you how to develop those functions. That said, this is actually all the work that you have to do to get your local development environment set up so you can start offering 8base functions and deploying them to your back end. Thanks for watching. Looking forward to seeing you in future videos.

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