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Tools Setup
We recommend using GNU/Linux or macOS for this course (this is what most of the staff uses). We will only offer best-effort support for Windows.
Make sure that the paths to your projects (the names of files, and folders that contain them, all the way up) do not contain spaces, special characters, or non-English letters. This is especially relevant on Windows, where, for instance, usernames containing spaces or special characters have caused issues in the past.
Step 1: Install Scala
Follow the “Install Scala on your computer” section of the instructions on the Scala website.
At some point, the Coursier setup program will ask: “No JVM found, should we try to install one? [Y/n]”. Respond “y” (for “yes”) and press Enter / ⏎. Similarly, when it asks about updating the PATH environment variable, respond “y”.
On macOS, you might need to first install the Homebrew package manager if it is not already installed.
On some Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu), you might see an error message, “curl: command not found”. In that case, use the following alternative command:
$ wget -qO- https://github.com/coursier/coursier/releases/latest/download/cs-x86_64-pc-linux.gz | gzip -d > cs && chmod +x cs && ./cs setup
(The $ in the command above is called the prompt and isn’t part of the command. It’s a convention used to indicate that you should type the text after the $ sign and then press the Enter or ⏎ key to execute the command.)
Restart your computer after the installation.
Step 2: Install Visual Studio Code
Follow the instructions on the Visual Studio Code website for your operating system:
Step 3: Install Metals
Install the “Scala (Metals)” VS Code extension:
Step 4: Install git
Git is a version control system. You will learn more about it next week in the software engineering lecture. For now, you just need to install it.
On Ubuntu and Debian
sudo apt update && sudo apt install git
On other Linux distributions
Use your distribution’s recommended package manager.
On macOS
brew install git