Running our Weather app on your machine

Prerequisites

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime for your terminal. Don’t worry too much about it, but it’s used by some tools we’ll be using to build our application. If you don’t have it installed already (check by running node -v in your terminal, which should print a version number) head over to nodejs.org, follow the instructions there to install the latest version (v6 at the time of this writing) and you’re good to go!

First steps

Facebook recently open sourced a neat little tool called create-react-app that allows us to very easily get started with our React app! It includes all the necessary build tools and transpilation steps to just get stuff done.

Let’s install it with npm:

npm install -g create-react-app

As soon as that’s finished you now have access to the create-react-app command in your terminal! Let’s create our barebones weather app:

create-react-app weather-app

The argument to create-react-app, in our case weather-app, tells the utility what to name the folder it’ll create. Since we’re creating a weather app, weather-app seems like a solid choice!

Install npm modules

During the lessons, you might have noticed that we have used a few npm modules. Let’s install those modules in your app directory

npm install --save redux react-redux
npm install --save redux-thunk
npm install --save immutable

Now comes the hardest part (just kidding :)).

Copy the code from the files below and put it into the respective files. index.js is already there and you should create the other files e.g. App.js, Plot.js, reducers.js, actions.js etc.