In this video we're going to create a workspace that we can use to store all
of the files that we create for our project one of the things that separates
a good developer from a great developer is organization I like to keep organized
by keeping all of my source code that I'm working with in a central location
as a developer you'll most likely be working with many different projects and
it really helps if you can keep all of these projects in a single location on
your machine this comes in really useful if you ever need to move machine
or you ever need to backup your source code because you can just copy one
directory to an external disk so let's go ahead and create a workspace
directory for our course.
I'm on a Mac so I'm going open up the Finder window and
then I'm going to go to go go to folder and enter the tilde
character this will take you to the home directory for the currently logged in
user if you're using Windows then you should
be able to do a similar thing using the Windows Explorer
I always create the
directory in my home folder because this makes it easy when navigating with the
terminal or the command prompt which we'll show you a bit later in the course
normally I call the directory workspace but for the purpose of this course I'm
going to put it in a folder called courses
once you've created your folder
open it up and then create a new subfolder that we're going to use for
our project the projects going to be called profiles - rest - API
it helps if
you don't include any spaces or special characters in the directory name because
this will make it a lot easier when you're navigating with the terminal or
the command prompt which we're going to show you in a minute
once you've created your directory for our project let's go ahead and open up
the atom editor and I'll show you how to add this project to the atom editor
workspace
if this is the first time you're opening up atom you'll see this
welcome screen you can close off these tabs and then you should just see a
blank entry text page like this
you can add working directories to Atom by
clicking file add project folder then navigate to the newly created courses
directory and then the profiles rest api directory that we created inside the
workspace and click open
this will open the project in atom editor this comes in
really useful because you can add multiple different projects that you're
working on at the same time to atom and it makes it a lot easier to work with
many projects at the same time
okay so now that we know how to open the project
in atom editor I'm going to show you how to navigate to our projects using the
terminal or if you're on Windows you're going to be using the git bash so since
we're on a Mac we're going to load up the terminal which you can get to if you
don't have it in a shortcut you can either get to it in the spotlight by typing
terminal or you can load up in the launcher here Launchpad and type
terminal there
okay once you have the terminal open it should by default open
to the home directory you can see this by this tilde character here if you're
on Windows then click on start and open up the git bash and you should see
something similar to this
if you want to make sure that you're on the home
directory then you can enter cd which stands for change directory and then the
tilde character and this will take you to the home directory
alright so we created
a new folder called courses in our home directory so let's type the LS command
which stands for list and this should list all the directories that are in the
current directory that we are on which is our home directory you can see that
we have our courses directory here so we can switch into the courses directory
by typing CD again that stands for change directory and then courses
forward slash
got to spell courses right and remember that it is usually case
sensitive so make sure that you use a capital C for courses
alright once
you're in the courses directory you can type LS and this will list all of the
sub folders in courses
you can see that we have the profiles REST API folder
here so again we can type cd profiles REST API hit
enter and then our terminal will change into the profiles REST API folder if you
If you ever want to know which folder you're in you can type PWD which will output the
current location so you can see I'm in users slash Mark Winterbottom
which is the home directory for the user slash courses slash profiles REST API
If you ever need to go back to the previous directory you can type CD dot dot and
hit enter and this will take you back to the previous directory that you were in
ok so that's how you navigate using the terminal and open up the project in atom