Development/Tool installation

This is a list of things you'll probably want to install to develop Growstuff code.

Supported platforms
We try to support Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux users. All the downloads listed here work on those three platforms, unless otherwise specified.

If you use another operating system, or a very old version of one of the ones we otherwise support, you might not be able to install some of these tools. If this is the case, please let us know, and we'll try and find a way to help you.

Vagrant and VirtualBox
These are used to create a virtual environment for you to do your development work in. This means that Growstuff's setup doesn't make a mess of anything else on your personal machine, and also ensures that all our developers have a consistent setup which matches our staging and production websites.


 * Download Virtualbox
 * Download Vagrant

Pairing tools
Most of our developers do remote pair programming using Skype and TeamViewer.


 * Download Skype
 * Download TeamViewer

(Note that if you and your partner want to use something else, that's fine! These are just the most common tools used by the current Growstuff developers.)

Developer tools
These are tools used to work on our code, for instance for version control or deployment.

Required

 * Git -- used by all our developers for version control.
 * A good coders' text editor. The most popular among our developers are:
 * SublimeText (powerful and relatively easy to use)
 * Vim (powerful but harder to learn)
 * Some other good text editors include:
 * gedit (comes with many Gnome-based Linux systems, also available for other platforms)
 * TextWrangler (OSX)
 * Notepad++ (Windows)

Optional

 * Heroku Toolbelt -- used to deploy to Heroku, which is what we use for our live servers, and is also a good, no-cost way to deploy features you're working on so others can see them.
 * Firebug -- Firefox plugin for debugging front-end code (CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc.)