By working in Docker containers, all of our code will work in the same environment. This helps mitigate the issue of developing on different platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux and its flavors), versions and hardware.

• Go to https://code.visualstudio.com/download and download the version for your platform and install it.

  
• In VS Code, install the Docker Container extension.
  

• As an example, we will create a folder proj that will contain a file Dockerfile (MUST BE THAT NAME, NO EXTENSION) that will create a Linux based environment with Python, PIP, Node.js, and NPM installed.

• In the Dockerfile, put this exact code

  • This code is commented to help understand what is happening.

  • The first line gets the image to start from (i.e. a version of Ubuntu). It is located online at the  Docker Hub . You can search for other images to start with for your own configurations. You can also upload your own.

  • apt-get installs the packages.

    • -y means to automatically say...

• Go to  Get Docker and download and install the Docker version for your platform

  • You have to install Docker Desktop for Mac

  • You have to install Docker Desktop for Windows

    • NOTE (IMPORTANT): Follow the instructions to install WSL 2 backend. This is what allows you to run Linux Docker container on a Windows machine.

  • You have to install Docker for Linux (there isn’t a Docker Desktop) for Linux at the time of this writing

• Check to make sure your Docker is installed by going to the terminal and checking the Docker version with this command.

 

 docker --version

 

• Set user name and email on your local git.

  • NOTE: Make sure the username and email is the same used for the GitHub repo shared with the team for the project.

git config --global user.name "Your Name"

git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

• Check config

git config --list

• Clone the GitHub repository

• This may work for you

• If the above code does not work for you (possibly on Windows or an older version of git), try this

  • FOR PRIVATE GITHUB REPOSITORY: You MUST include the username with collaboration permissions (i.e. the GitHub username you are using for this project)

  • The the syntax will be https://<YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME>@github.com/<GITHUB ADDRESS>

• Check remote origin (be in the git repo folder locally on your machine) 

git remote show origin

• List branches

  • Git local branches only

• Git remote branches

• Git all...