Nitrous is a powerful IDE (integrated development environment) for building and previewing web applications. With a live console, text editor (with syntax highlighting), and server with preview options, it has everything you need to develop for Bloc Courses.
Creating an account is simple. Go to nitrous.io and enter in a username, password and email. You can even use your Github account to login if you're wary of creating another account for a singular purpose.
Once you've finished the account creation, you'll want to choose the Node stack, and select the region that is closest to your current location in the dropdown (this is so that they can find a Nitrous server closest to you, which will maximize the speed with which your app preforms).
The name of your app doesn't matter. It's just for reference. Also, there's no need to add your Github repo yet. We'll be doing that shortly.
You may see some screens in between signing up about using Nitrous locally with your text editor like Sublime. While you can do this, we recommend sticking to the in-browser editor for simplicity's sake.
Once you've navigated to the home screen (see the screenshot at the beginning of this resource for what it looks like), you can start following the Development Environment instructions for Mac/Linux (don't worry, we're reproducing them here so you won't need to open the checkpoint separately). Nitrous elminates the need for Vagrant an all of it's instructions. We can start with the instructions on cloning Bloc Jams. Anything related to the Terminal or the command line will be done in the console section of Nitrous. the workspace/ directory will be the equivalent of your root directory. Make this your current directory before cloning Bloc Jams.
$ cd workspace/
$ git clone https://github.com/Bloc/bloc-jams-student-skeleton.git bloc-jams # This will create a local copy of our skeleton code in a directory called 'bloc-jams'.
$ cd bloc-jams # Makes our current directory the bloc-jams skeleton
Because Nitrous runs on Linux, there won't be any need for installing your Node Packages with the --no-bin-links parameter. Continuing with the Linux instructions.
$ npm install
The Bower tracking prompt is inconsequential. You can choose yes or no and it'll have no impact on your Dev Environment.
Once you've installed everything, you'll be able to run
$ npm start
which will allow you start previewing your application in browser. Navigate to the preview link at the top of the IDE. Choose port 3000 and you'll see your Bloc Jams app in a new browser tab.
Voila! You have a sparkly new dev environment that you can access from any computer with the same compatibility everywhere.
A friendly reminder that needs to be emphasized -- you do not need to do anything Vagrant or VirtualBox related to use Nitrous. Whenever the Terminal is referenced in the material, translate that to mean 'Nitrous'. See Vagrant? That means Nitrous. There shouldn't be too much confusion, but it's worth re-iterating.
Before we explain how to get started with Nitrous, one of the most common questions we get about it as a viable alternative to developing locally is "Will this translate to programming in the real world?".
It's true that it's highly unlikely you will find yourself developing on a platform like Nitrous in a Junior Developer position or on any programming team you might find yourself. However, Nitrous does not abstract many of the most important concepts from learning to program and learning to be a programmer. Some of the most relevant concepts that we teach in Bloc courses are:
- Learning to use the command line
- Learning programming concepts and syntax
- Learning how to build real world applications
- Using git and Github, and deploying to Heroku
None of these concepts are compromised by using Nitrous. If anything, Nitrous makes understanding the relationship between these skills more salient by keeping them all in one place. It is equivalent to working with a Virtual Machine on your own computer, without having to deal with the fuss of setting one up.