Part 1: Prerequisites

In this first part, I will get your up and running with the FreeSewing development environment.

If you are familiar with JavaScript and its ecosystem, you can probably skip this section. If not, I have good news and bad news (and then some more good news) for you.

The good news is that JavaScript is an easy language to pick up. It is also a very popular and versatile language and the skills you learn here will serve you well.

The bad news is that the JavaScript ecosystem is vast, and unfortunately somewhat fractured. Most of the problems people need help with are not so much in the code itself, but rather getting everything to work together. This is true not just for FreeSewing, but pretty much all modern JavaScript.

But, no need to despair, FreeSewing provides a development environment that will take care of all of this for you. So you can focus on designing patterns.

If you have NodeJS on your system, getting that development environment up and running takes only a single command:

npx @freesewing/new-design

If you don’t have NodeJS on your system --- or if you’re not sure what NodeJS is to begin with --- read on to learn how to install it.