/phase-0-organizing-work-on-your-computer

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Organizing Your Work for this Course

Learning Goals

  • Configure a directory for storing lessons
  • Understand the relationship between navigating directories in the terminal and navigating directories in a graphical user interface like Finder
  • Practice common terminal commands such as pwd, ls, mkdir, and cd

Instructions

From now on, you'll be executing code on your own computer. For each and every lab, you'll be copying the code to your computer using Git. You will then be able to run and test your code in your terminal, and submit your work using the learn-co gem.

MacOS: Setting Up Your Directory Structure

For Mac users, follow along with this video:

<iframe width="640" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_zeNHyW9gvw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

WSL: Setting Up Your Directory Structure

For Windows users, follow along with this video:

<iframe width="640" height="480" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EwLe9M4xZlk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Creating Folders to Organize Your Work

  • Go to your terminal and navigate to your home directory by typing cd ~
  • Create a Development folder by typing mkdir Development (if you're a mac user, this folder already exists)
  • Navigate into this folder with cd Development
  • Create a directory for all your assignments by typing mkdir code
  • Navigate into this folder with cd code
  • In here, create a directory for the prework with mkdir prework

You'll be going through multiple phases in this course, so it may also be helpful to go one step further and create folders for phases 0 through 5 within code.

Having a specific place for your work will make it easier to find if you ever need to look back at an earlier project. It'll also keep the rest of your computer's folders clear of random code.

Terminal Command Reference

Here's a quick reference of the terminal commands used in these videos. For more, check out this awesome cheatsheet.

Command Description
ls List all files and folders in the current directory
ls -a List all files and folders, including hidden files
mkdir [name] Make a new directory with the given [name]
cd [folder] Change directories to the given [folder]
cd .. Change directories to the parent directory
cd ~ Change directories to the home directory
pwd Print the full path of the current working directory
explorer.exe (Windows) Open the File Explorer to the current directory
open . (Mac) Open the Finder application to the current directory

Resources