Setting up Dev environment for Nodejs coffeescript development

This article describes my experiences in selecting the development environment for Nodejs and coffee scripts.

First Step: Choosing  OS

Most of the JS developers use windows. Since I am from networking background, I preferred Linux and that too Ubuntu system. Download and installation of Ubuntu is simple and fast.

Second step: Choosing an Editor

I do not have Java Background. In my career so far, I used vim, cscope and ctags. vim by default does not highlight coffee script syntax. When opened an coffeescript file, it showed as if its plain text. Hence I began to search for proper editor to use. I understand there are some very good IDE like eclipse. But I have to jump start and not worry about learning new IDEs.

I found one good vim extension that suits my needs. It is vim-coffee-script. Here is a quick setup guide installing it. If you are used to other editors – Check this link if it needs any extensions and add your experiences in comments of this blog.

Here are the steps to install vim-coffee-script:

1) Download the latest zipball from vim.org or github. The latest version on github is under Download Packages (don’t use the Download buttons.)

2) Extract the archive into ~/.vim/:

unzip -od ~/.vim vim-coffee-script-HASH.zip

You can compile coffee scripts using vim-coffee-scripts using vim. Read more about it here.

Third Step: Installing node and npm

Ubuntu has good package support. To install node, coffee script and npm just run the following.

sudo apt-get install node coffeescript npm
Thats it. Development environment for Node using coffeescripts in Ubuntu is ready to use.