My Web Development Setup – WSL, Volta, Node, Pnpm, And Zsh

Are you interested in finding out about my web development setup? In this post, I will show you how I use WSL and Volta to manage my Node.js installation. Additionally, I will show you which shell and package manager I use.

• The idea
• The components
• Conclusion

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The Idea

Each component used in this developer setup plays together to create an easy-to-use development experience. WSL allows developers to run Linux tools and applications directly on Windows without the need for a virtual machine or dual-booting. Volta helps you to manage your JavaScript command-line tools. pnpm is a fast, disk space-efficient package manager for Node.js and zsh is a Unix shell. Finally, VS Code is a free code editor.

The Components

WSL

WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is a compatibility layer to run Linux tools and applications directly on Windows without the need for a virtual machine or dual-booting.

• Install WSL 2 by following the steps in the WSL install documentation.
• Then open WSL and continue with the other components.

zsh

zsh is a Unix shell and allows for personal customization through plugins. One popular framework to manage zsh is called “Oh my ZSH!” and makes this a really nice process. It’s safe to say that zsh made me more productive!

• apt install zsh
• sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Volta

Volta is a tool for managing Node.js versions. It allows developers to easily switch between different versions of Node.js on a per-project basis and also allows the installation of different JavaScript related CLI tools.

• curl https://get.volta.sh | bash

Node

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a web browser. It allows developers to build scalable network applications using JavaScript on both the client side and server side.

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• volta install node

pnpm

pnpm is a fast, disk space-efficient package manager for Node.js. It uses hard links and symlinks to save one copy of each package in a global cache instead of duplicating them across projects.

• volta install pnpm

VS Code

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a free source-code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. It includes support for debugging, embedded Git control and GitHub, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring.

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• Install VS Code on Windows here
• Install the WSL Extension

Conclusion

This developer setup consisting of WSL, Volta, Node, pnpm, zsh, and VS Code provides an easy-to-use and highly customizable development environment for developers who want to do Web Development on Windows machines. I have been using this exact setup for over a year now and I am super happy with it.

I hope this a little bit different post was interesting to you! If you have any questions let me know and subscribe to my monthly newsletter to stay up to date on my latest posts.