Getting Windows ready for Web Development

February 7, 2016
tutorial windows

As I have been experiencing issues on my MSI laptop, I had to format a few times lately. This quick tutorial show you how to setup your Windows computer for web development. Getting all the tools properly installed is not as nearly as easy on Unix based systems like Ubuntu or OSX.

Open cmd.exe, Run as Administrator

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin

Installing Ruby & Favorites Tools

  1. choco install ruby
  2. choco install rubygems
  3. choco install ruby2.devkit (If the install fails, please see http://stackoverflow.com/a/10695190)
  4. gem install bundler jekyll wordmove

Troubleshooting Ruby on Windows

Replacing cmd.exe

There are a bunch of console tools alternative to cmd.exe. My favorite one is ConEmu. It doesn't include as many tools as Babun, but it works just perfectly for my workflow. Here is a list of the most maintained console tools (they are all maintained on Github):

  • choco install babun
  • choco install conemu
  • choco install cmder
  • choco install consolez

If you use Conemu, open the settings (Win + Alt + T) then go to Integration. Click the Register button and Conemu will be added to the Explorer context menu integration.

Installing PHP & Favorite Tools

  1. First, make sure to install Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 as it's required by PHP7. Read more on stackoverflow.
  2. choco install php
  3. choco install composer

Installing & Configuring Git

  1. choco install git.install
  2. git config --global user.email "julien@vernet.me"
  3. git config --global user.name "Julien Vernet"

Installing Node & Favorite Tools

  1. choco install nodejs.install
  2. Restart cmd.exe
  3. npm install -g bower gulp-cli grunt-cli surge

Updating all installed packages

choco update all

Version 0.9.9+ of Chocolatey now does a real update of packages, instead of installing newer versions beside older ones.

Symbolic Links are just amazingly useful. Put it simply, symlinks are kind of shortcuts that softwares can actually follow (You can read more about it on wikipedia). Instead of constantly setting up backup tasks, you could take advantage of symlinks to point to your Dropbox folder (for instance).

I use sysmlink for my .ssh folder that contains all my SSH keys. Everything is actually stored on my Dropbox folder, which is on another hard drive. I'm doing the same thing for my Sublime Text 3 Settings.

You could use a GUI like Symlinker, but I prefer to simply use the command line:

  1. mklink /D "C:\Users\<yourusername>\.ssh" "D:\Dropbox\Apps Profiles\.ssh"
  2. mklink /D "C:\Users\<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\Sublime Text 3" "D:\Dropbox\Apps Profiles\Sublime Text 3"
Back to Blog