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Setting up your development environment

Contents

The purpose of this chapter is to ensure you have the necessary tools to start developing efficiently with XP.

In general, the bare minimum you’ll need is:

  • Enonic CLI → managing your XP projects

  • Git / Github → versioning your XP projects

  • Editor / IDE (Integrated Development Environment) → coding your ideas into XP projects

If you’ve already got this configured and installed, feel free to skip to the next chapter.

Enonic CLI

Enonic provides a Command Line Interface (CLI) for working with XP.

If the concept of CLI is new to you, you can imagine it as an interactive terminal program that will listen for some specific inputs (usually as text), and based on them, execute specific tasks on your machine.

The goal of the CLI is to improve the development workflow, and, by using it, you’ll have an easy and quick way to manage your XP apps.

Installation

The easiest and fastest way to install the CLI is by using Node Package Manager (NPM):

npm install -g @enonic/cli

Note that to run the npm install command you need to make sure that you have both Node and NPM installed on your machine. You can quickly check if they are installed by running the following commands on your terminal:

node -v

to check the version of Node you have installed locally. Same for NPM:

npm -v

If they are not installed, you can head to nodejs.org to proceed installing them.

Enonic CLI is also available on other package managers, such as brew for MacOS, scoop for Windows and Snapcraft on Linux.

Verification

After running the installation command above, you can check if the Enonic CLI was properly installed by running

enonic -v

Commands

Let’s first list some commands…​ run the following command in your terminal:

enonic

It should output something that looks a bit like this:

Main help page 
Enonic CLI 2.6.1
Manage XP instances, home folders and projects
USAGE:
   enonic [global options] [command] [command options] [arguments...]

COMMANDS:
     create     Create a new Enonic project
     snapshot   Create and restore snapshots
     dump       Dump and load complete repositories
     export     Export data from a given repository, branch and content path.
     import     Import data from a named export.
     app        Install, stop and start applications
     repo       Tune and manage repositories
     cms        CMS commands
     system     System commands
     auditlog   Manage audit log repository
     latest     Check for latest version
     upgrade    Upgrade to the latest version
     uninstall  Uninstall Enonic CLI
     vacuum     Removes old version history and segments from content storage
     help, h    Shows a list of commands or help for one command

CLOUD COMMANDS:
     cloud  Manage Enonic cloud

PROJECT COMMANDS:
     sandbox  Manage Enonic instances
     project  Manage Enonic projects

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --help, -h     show help
   --version, -v  print the version

If you want to know more about how to use one of the subcommands, you can use the help subcommand. For instance, if you want to know more about the sandbox subcommand, you can run:

enonic sandbox help
Sandbox help page 
NAME:
   enonic sandbox - Manage Enonic instances

USAGE:
   enonic sandbox [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

VERSION:
   2.6.1

COMMANDS:
   list, ls         List all sandboxes
   start            Start the sandbox.
   stop             Stop the sandbox started in detached mode.
   create           Create a new sandbox.
   delete, del, rm  Delete a sandbox
   upgrade, up      Upgrades the distribution version.

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --help, -h  show help

As can be seen, there are a lot of commands and their subcommands to help you. On this guide, we’ll only cover the necessary ones to be able to start developing on XP.

Consider checking the CLI documentation to further investigate its capabilities.

Git

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system. Later on in this tutorial, we will create new Enonic development projects using starters. The Enonic CLI uses Git to download these starters and to prepare the files for your project locally.

Want to learn more about Git? Check out this useful Git handbook by Github.

Installation

To install Git, follow the notes for your operating system below.

macOS

Apple maintains its own fork of Git. If you have XCode installed, you already have Git installed too.

To install Git via Homebrew, run this command:

brew install git

Windows

To install Git using Scoop, run the following command from Powershell:

scoop install git

Linux

To install Git with Snapcraft, run the following command:

sudo snap install git

Verification

Once you have installed Git, you can verify that it’s working correctly by running the following command:

git version

Editor

Source-code editors (also known as text editors or just editors for short) are applications designed primarily for editing plain text and often specifically for working with code. They are therefore commonly used for programming.

If you do not yet have an editor you like, follow the steps below to get started with one.

Download Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code (often shortened to VS Code or simply Code) is one of the most popular source-code editors around at the moment. It’s free, open source, and available on all major platforms.

You can navigate to their download page and install the version matching your operating system.

If you opt to move forward with VS code as your editor, its worth checking some of the powerful extensions available on their marketplace.

Summary

Congrats! You’ve installed the Enonic CLI, Git, and an editor. You’re now set up to start working with Enonic XP 🚀. Keep your new tools at hand; we’ll be using them heavily throughout this guide, so you’ll have lots of time to get to know them better.

Next up, you will get familiar with sandboxes.

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