Set up Notes - abbernie/web-dev-sp17 GitHub Wiki

Local vs. Remote Servers

Often in web development, you'll build something and test it by running it on your computer without putting it out on the internet at all. In that scenario, your computer is acting as a small-scale server. That's referred to as running something locally. Because a server is essentially just a program, they can live any number of places, including on your laptop where you're the only one who can access it. Of course, we're going to pretty quickly want to start putting things out to the outside world, aka the internet, so we'll use Digital Ocean's server. A server that isn't on a machine you can touch is called a remote server.

It's common that your workflow will consist of testing and running locally (on your computer), and then uploading and deploying remotely (to your Digital Ocean account). We will be working both locally and remotely in this course.

Detailed instructions on setting up your remote server on Digital Ocean are on the Digital Ocean Set Up page in GoucherLearn.

Tools You'll Need

To upload files to the remote server at Digital Ocean, you need an FTP client. We'll officially be using Cyberduck in this class, but if you have another one you prefer, like Filezilla, feel free to use that instead.

There are a few tasks for which we'll need Terminal. One of them is using Git and connecting to GitHub. In MacOSX, Terminal is built in; it's in "Applications > Utilities". If you use Windows, you can enter "cmd" in the Search or Run line, or use PowerShell PowerShell which is included with Windows 10.

You'll write your code in a text editor application. If you don't have a text editor already, download Sublime Text.

IMPORTANT: do NOT use a program like Microsoft Word, TextEdit, or Google Docs for writing code. These are word-processing programs, and won't work for code. Do NOT use Dreamweaver or similar programs to write code.