---
title: Setup and development
---

## First-time setup

Make sure you have the following installed:

- [Node](https://nodejs.org/en/) (>= 12)
- [NPM](https://docs.npmjs.com/downloading-and-installing-node-js-and-npm) (at least 1.0)

## Installation

```bash
# Install dependencies from package.json
npm install
```

## Dev server

> Note: If you're on Linux and see an `ENOSPC` error when running the commands below, you must [increase the number of available file watchers](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22475849/node-js-error-enospc#answer-32600959).

```bash
# Launch the dev server
npm run dev
or
yarn dev

```

<!-- ### Developing with the production API

By default, dev and tests filter requests through [the mock API](/docs/tests.md#the-mock-api) in `tests/mock-api`. To test directly against a local/live API instead, run dev and test commands with the `API_BASE_URL` environment variable set. For example:

```bash
# To develop against a local backend server
API_BASE_URL=http://localhost:3000 yarn dev


``` -->


 ## Aliases

To simplify referencing local modules and refactoring, you can set aliases to be shared between dev and unit tests in `aliases.config.js`. As a convention, this project uses an `@` prefix to denote aliases.

 ## Globals

### Base components

[Base components](https://vuejs.org/v2/style-guide/#Base-component-names-strongly-recommended) (a.k.a. presentational, dumb, or pure components) that apply app-specific styling and conventions should all begin with the `Base` prefix.

Since these components are typically used in place of raw HTML element (and thus used as frequently), they're automatically globally registered for convenience. This means you don't have to import and locally register them to use them in templates.