ubuntu.md

Setup instructions

You will find below the instructions to set up your computer for Le Wagon AI Software Development course.

Please read them carefully and execute all commands in the following order.

If you get stuck, don't hesitate to ask a teacher for help 🙋

You can also have a look at our cheatsheets for common issue fixes and tips ✔️

Let's start 🚀

GitHub account

Have you signed up to GitHub? If not, do it right away.

👉 Upload a picture and put your name correctly on your GitHub account. This is important as we'll use an internal dashboard with your avatar. Please do this now, before you continue with this guide.

👉 Enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). GitHub will send you text messages with a code when you try to log in. This is important for security and also will soon be required in order to contribute code on GitHub.

Visual Studio Code

Installation

Let's install Visual Studio Code text editor.

Copy (Ctrl + C) the commands below then paste them in your terminal (Ctrl + Shift + v):

wget -qO- https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > packages.microsoft.gpg

sudo install -o root -g root -m 644 packages.microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf signed-by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/packages.microsoft.gpg] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/code stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list'

rm -f packages.microsoft.gpg

sudo apt update

sudo apt install -y code

These commands will ask for your password: type it in.

⚠️ When you type your password, nothing will show up on the screen, that's normal. This is a security feature to mask not only your password as a whole but also its length. Just type in your password and when you're done, press Enter.

Launching from the terminal

Now let's launch VS Code from the terminal:

code

✔️ If a VS Code window has just opened, you're good to go 👍

❌ Otherwise, please contact a teacher

VS Code Extensions

Installation

Let's install some useful extensions to VS Code.

Copy-paste the following commands in your terminal:

code --install-extension ms-vscode.sublime-keybindings
code --install-extension emmanuelbeziat.vscode-great-icons
code --install-extension github.github-vscode-theme
code --install-extension MS-vsliveshare.vsliveshare
code --install-extension shopify.ruby-lsp
code --install-extension dbaeumer.vscode-eslint
code --install-extension Rubymaniac.vscode-paste-and-indent
code --install-extension alexcvzz.vscode-sqlite
code --install-extension anteprimorac.html-end-tag-labels
code --install-extension rayhanw.erb-helpers

Here is a list of the extensions you are installing:

• Sublime Text Keymap and Settings Importer
• VSCode Great Icons
• Live Share
• Ruby
• ESLint
• Paste and Indent
• SQLite

VS Code AI Features

VS Code includes many powerful AI features, which are a great tool once you already know how to code.

That said, relying on AI too early can hide important concepts and make debugging harder to understand. Once you’re comfortable with the fundamentals, you’ll know when and how to use AI effectively — without letting it do the thinking for you.

For the start of the bootcamp, we’ll disable these features. At the right point in the course, we’ll reenable them so you can put them to good use.

In VS Code:

1. Let's open the VS Code "Command Palette": type Ctrl-Shift-P (Windows / Linux) or Cmd-Shift-P (macOS).
2. This will open the Command Palette: a small text box at the top of your screen. Start typing aifeatures until you see "Chat: Learn How to Hide AI features". Click on it.
3. This will open the settings, and will show you the option "Disable and hide built-in AI features ...". Tick the checkbox in front of that option.

Later, if you want to reenable the AI features, you can follow the same instructions to untick the checkbox.

Live Share configuration

Visual Studio Live Share is a VS Code extension which allows you to share the code in your text editor for debugging and pair-programming: let's set it up!

Launch VS Code from your terminal by typing code and pressing Enter.

Click on the little arrow at the bottom of the left bar 👇

• Click on the "Share" button, then on "GitHub (Sign in using GitHub account)".
• A popup appears asking you to sign in with GitHub: click on "Allow".
• You are redirected to a GitHub page in you browser asking you to authorize Visual Studio Code: click on "Continue" then "Authorize github".
• VS Code may display additional pop-ups: close them by clicking "OK".

That's it, you're good to go!

Command line tools

Check the locale

The locale is a mechanism allowing to customize programs to your language and country.

Let's verify that the default locale is set to English, please type this in the Ubuntu terminal:

locale

If the output does not contain LANG=en_US.UTF-8, run the following command in a Ubuntu terminal to install the english locale:

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

If after, you receive a warning (bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.utf-8)) in your terminal, please do the following:

Generate locale

Please, run this lines in your terminal.

sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install language-pack-en language-pack-en-base manpages

Zsh & Git

Instead of using the default bash shell, we will use zsh.

We will also use git, a command line software used for version control.

Let's install them, along with other useful tools:

• Open an Ubuntu terminal
• Copy and paste the following commands:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install -y curl git imagemagick jq unzip vim zsh tree

These commands will ask for your password: type it in.

⚠️ When you type your password, nothing will show up on the screen, that's normal. This is a security feature to mask not only your password as a whole but also its length. Just type in your password and when you're done, press Enter.

GitHub CLI installation

Let's now install GitHub official CLI (Command Line Interface). It's a software used to interact with your GitHub account via the command line.

In your terminal, copy-paste the following commands and type in your password if asked:

sudo apt remove -y gitsome # gh command can conflict with gitsome if already installed
curl -fsSL https://cli.github.com/packages/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg | sudo dd of=/usr/share/keyrings/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg

echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/githubcli-archive-keyring.gpg] https://cli.github.com/packages stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/github-cli.list > /dev/null

sudo apt update

sudo apt install -y gh

To check that gh has been successfully installed on your machine, you can run:

gh --version

✔️ If you see gh version X.Y.Z (YYYY-MM-DD), you're good to go 👍

❌ Otherwise, please contact a teacher

Oh-my-zsh

Let's install the zsh plugin Oh My Zsh.

In a terminal execute the following command:

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

If asked "Do you want to change your default shell to zsh?", press Y

At the end your terminal should look like this:

✔️ If it does, you can continue 👍

❌ Otherwise, please ask for a teacher

GitHub CLI

CLI is the acronym of Command-line Interface.

In this section, we will use GitHub CLI to interact with GitHub directly from the terminal.

It should already be installed on your computer from the previous commands.

We will use the GitHub CLI (gh) to connect to GitHub using SSH, a protocol to log in using SSH keys instead of the well known username/password pair.

First in order to login, copy-paste the following command in your terminal:

⚠️ DO NOT edit the email — Even though user:email looks like a placeholder for your actual email address, it isn't — do not replace it.

gh auth login -s 'user:email' -w --git-protocol ssh

gh will ask you few questions:

• Generate a new SSH key to add to your GitHub account? Press Enter to ask gh to generate the SSH keys for you.

  If you already have SSH keys, you will see instead Upload your SSH public key to your GitHub account? With the arrows, select your public key file path and press Enter.

• Enter a passphrase for your new SSH key (Optional):

  • FOR MOST PEOPLE: Just press Enter to skip. You don't need a passphrase for the bootcamp and it would prompt you every time you use the key. There is a risk, however, that if someone steals your laptop, they could then push to GitHub.
  • IF SECURITY IS REALLY IMPORTANT TO YOU: Enter a passphrase of your choice and press Enter. It's really important that if you enter a passphrase, you write it down somewhere immediately and do not lose/forget it. You will need to enter this frequently.

• Title for your SSH key. You can leave it at the proposed "GitHub CLI", press Enter.

You will then get the following output:

! First copy your one-time code: 0EF9-D015
- Press Enter to open github.com in your browser...

Select and copy the code (0EF9-D015 in the example), then press Enter.

Your browser will open and ask you to authorize GitHub CLI to use your GitHub account. Accept and wait a bit.

Come back to the terminal, press Enter again, and that's it.

To check that you are properly connected, type:

gh auth status

✔️ If you get Logged in to github.com as <YOUR USERNAME> , then all good 👍

❌ If not, contact a teacher.

Dotfiles (Standard configuration)

Hackers love to refine and polish their shell and tools.

We'll start with a great default configuration provided by Le Wagon: lewagon/dotfiles.

As your configuration is personal, you need your own repository storing it. So you will fork Le Wagon repository.

Forking means that you will create a new repo in your own GitHub account $GITHUB_USERNAME/dotfiles, identical to the original Le Wagon one that you will be able to modify at will.

Open your terminal and set a variable for your GitHub username:

export GITHUB_USERNAME=`gh api user | jq -r '.login'`

echo $GITHUB_USERNAME

✔️ You should see your GitHub username printed.

❌ If not, stop here and ask for help. There may be a problem with the previous step (gh auth).

⚠️ Please note that this variable is only set for the time your terminal is open. If you close it before or during the next steps, you need to set it again with the two steps above!

Time to fork the repo and clone it on your computer:

mkdir -p ~/code/$GITHUB_USERNAME && cd $_

gh repo fork lewagon/dotfiles --clone

Dotfiles installer

Run the dotfiles installer:

cd ~/code/$GITHUB_USERNAME/dotfiles

zsh install.sh

Check the emails registered with your GitHub Account. You'll need to pick one at the next step:

gh api user/emails | jq -r '.[].email'

✔️ If you see the list of your registered emails, you can proceed 👍

❌ If not, please reauthenticate to GitHub before running this command ☝️ again.

git installer

Run the git installer:

cd ~/code/$GITHUB_USERNAME/dotfiles && zsh git_setup.sh

☝️ This will prompt you for your name (FirstName LastName) and your email.

⚠️ You need to put one of the emails listed above thanks to the previous gh api ... command. If you don't do that, Kitt won't be able to track your progress. 💡 Select the @users.noreply.github.com address if you don't want your email to appear in public repositories you may contribute to.

Please now reset your terminal by running:

exec zsh

This reloads your shell so it picks up the new configuration.

Disable SSH passphrase prompt

You don't want to be asked for your passphrase every time you communicate with a distant repository. So, you need to add the plugin ssh-agent to oh my zsh:

First, open the .zshrc file:

code ~/.zshrc

Then:

• Spot the line starting with plugins=
• Add ssh-agent at the end of the plugins list

✔️ Save the .zshrc file with Ctrl + S and close your text editor.

rbenv

Let's install rbenv, a software to install and manage ruby environments.

First, we need to clean up any previous Ruby installation you might have:

rvm implode && sudo rm -rf ~/.rvm
# If you got "zsh: command not found: rvm", carry on.
# It means `rvm` is not on your computer, that's what we want!
rm -rf ~/.rbenv

Then in the terminal, run:

sudo apt install -y build-essential tklib zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libffi-dev libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libreadline-dev libyaml-dev

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build

exec zsh

Ruby

Installation

Now, you are ready to install the latest ruby version and set it as the default version.

Run this command, it will take a while (5-10 minutes)

rbenv install 3.3.5

Once the ruby installation is done, run this command to tell the system to use the 3.3.5 version by default.

rbenv global 3.3.5

Reset your terminal and check your Ruby version:

exec zsh

Then run:

ruby -v

✔️ If you see something starting with ruby 3.3.5 then you can proceed 👍

❌ If not, ask a teacher

Installing some gems

If you are in China 🇨🇳 click here

⚠️ If you are in China, you should update the way we'll install gem with the following commands.

# China only!
gem sources --remove https://rubygems.org/
gem sources -a https://gems.ruby-china.com/
gem sources -l
# *** CURRENT SOURCES ***
# https://gems.ruby-china.com/
# Ruby-china.com must be in the list now

Everyone, in China or not, continue here to install gems.

In the ruby world, we call external libraries gems: they are pieces of ruby code that you can download and execute on your computer. Let's install some!

First, we'll update bundler, which is what lets us install gems:

gem update bundler

In your terminal, copy-paste the following command:

gem install colored faker http pry-byebug rake rails:8.1.1 rest-client rspec rubocop-performance sqlite3:2.8.1 activerecord:8.1.1 ruby-lsp

✔️ If you get xx gems installed, then all good 👍

❌ If you encounter the following error:

ERROR: While executing gem ... (TypeError)
incompatible marshal file format (can't be read)
format version 4.8 required; 60.33 given

Run the following command:

rm -rf ~/.gemrc

Rerun the command to install the gems.

⚠️ NEVER install a gem with sudo gem install! Even if you stumble upon a Stackoverflow answer (or the terminal) telling you to do so.

Node.js

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime to execute JavaScript code in the terminal. Let's install it with nvm, a version manager for Node.js.

In a terminal, execute the following commands:

curl -o- https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.1/install.sh | zsh

exec zsh

Then run the following command:

nvm -v

You should see a version. If not, ask a teacher.

Now let's install node:

nvm install 20.17.0

When the installation is finished, run:

node -v

If you see v20.17.0, the installation succeeded ✔️ You can then run:

nvm cache clear

❌ If not, contact a teacher

yarn

yarn is a package manager to install JavaScript libraries. Let's install it:

In a terminal, run the following commands:

corepack enable
yarn set version stable

⚠️ If you see any error messages, try running npm install -g corepack and then run the commands above again.

exec zsh

Then run the following command:

yarn -v

✔️ If you see a version, you're good 👍

❌ If not, ask for a teacher

SQLite

In a few weeks, we'll talk about databases and SQL. SQLite is a database engine used to execute SQL queries on single-file databases. Let's install it:

In a terminal, execute the following commands:

sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev pkg-config

Then run the following command:

sqlite3 -version

✔️ If you see a version, you're good 👍

❌ If not, ask for a teacher

PostgreSQL

Sometimes, SQLite is not enough and we will need a more advanced tool called PostgreSQL, an open-source robust and production-ready database system.

Let's install it now.

Run the following commands:

sudo apt install -y postgresql postgresql-contrib libpq-dev build-essential

sudo -u postgres psql --command "CREATE ROLE \"`whoami`\" LOGIN createdb superuser;"

Check-up

Let's check if you successfully installed everything.

In you terminal, run the following command:

exec zsh

Then run:

curl -Ls https://github.com/lewagon/setup/master/check.rb > _.rb && ruby _.rb && rm _.rb || rm _.rb

✔️ If you get a green Awesome! Your computer is now ready!, then you're good 👍

❌ If not, contact a teacher.

Kitt

You should have received an email from Le Wagon inviting you to sign up on Kitt (our learning platform). When submitting your onboarding form on Kitt, you should have received two additional invitations:

• One from Slack, inviting you to the Le Wagon Alumni slack community (where you'll chat with your buddies and all the previous alumni). Click on Join and fill the information.
• One from GitHub, inviting you to lewagon team. Accept it otherwise you won't be able to access the lecture slides.

If you haven't, please contact your teaching team.

Slack

Slack is a communication platform pretty popular in the tech industry.

Installation

Download the Slack app and install it.

⚠️ If you are already using Slack in your browser, please download and install the desktop app which is fully featured.

Settings

Launch the app and sign in to lewagon-alumni organization.

Make sure you upload a profile picture 👇

The idea is that you'll have Slack open all day, so that you can share useful links / ask for help / decide where to go to lunch / etc.

To ensure that everything is working fine for video calls, let's test your camera and microphone:

• Open the Slack app
• Click your profile picture in the top right.
• Select Preferences from the menu.
• Click Audio & video in the left-side column.
• Below Troubleshooting, click Run an audio, video and screensharing test. The test will open in a new window.
• Check that your preferred speaker, microphone and camera devices appear in the drop-down menus, then click Start test.

✔️ When the test is finished, you should see green "Succeed" messages at least for your microphone and camera. 👍

❌ If not, contact a teacher.

You can also install Slack app on your phone and sign in lewagon-alumni!

Ubuntu settings

Install video codec H264

On our pedagogical platform (Kitt, you'll soon discover it!), we have some videos. By default Firefox on Linux cannot play them as they use an unsupported codec (H264). To get those videos working for you, you need to run this:

sudo apt install libavcodec-extra -y

Install useful terminal tools

tree is a nice tool to visualize a directory tree inside the terminal:

ncdu is a text-based interface disk utility.

htop is an interactive process viewer.

tig is a text-mode interface for git.

sudo apt install tree ncdu htop tig

Ubuntu inotify

Ubuntu is always tracking changes in your folders and to do this it uses inotify. By default the Ubuntu limit is set to 8192 files monitored.

As programming involves a lot of files, we need to raise this limit. In your terminal run:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

Pin apps to your dock

You are going to use most of the apps you've installed today really often. So let's pin them to your dock so that they are just one click away!

To pin an app to your dock, launch the app, right-click on the icon in the dock to bring up the context menu and choose "Add to Favorites".

You must pin:

• Your terminal
• Your file explorer
• VS Code
• Your Internet browser
• Slack

Setup completed!

Your computer is now all set for Le Wagon AI Software Development course 💪 👏

Enjoy the bootcamp, you will nail it 🚀