Homework: H1 Development Environment Setup

A key aspect of a CS degree is developing solid software development skills. General knowledge about software engineering is desirable, but skills require practice within a specific context. Thus, all students in this course will be required to master full-stack web development in Rails.

The goal of this homework is to ensure that you have a functioning Rails development environment for the course skills tests and for the course project. To accomplish this goal, you must set up a development environment as per the following instructions.

To facilitate the discussion of technical issues and to enable students to learn the material collaboratively, all students must use the software stack defined herein.

Instructions

  1. If you are doing this homework using the university Wi-Fi, make sure that you are using the “um” network. Do not use the “um-guest” network, which has ports blocked that are needed for some of the commands below to work properly.

  2. Activate your Piazza account (http://piazza.com/) for the course. You should have received an email invitation (sent to your university email address). If did you not receive an email, contact the instructor. If you run into any technical problem or have any question during the course, post your question to Piazza (Q&A). The instructor as well as your fellow students have the opportunity to answer your question. Moreover, other students will be able to see your question and the answer, saving them the time and trouble of asking the same question.

  3. Perform all the steps in this demonstration video. Be sure not to lose your GitHub username and password!