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Comment by itcrowd | Hacker News Reader

It always annoys me when I read something like:

   To try Astro on your local machine, run npm create astro@latest in any terminal.

because it doesn't make it clear to me what to do before this command will actually do anything. No, running this command will not work in any terminal.

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A few years ago when I was trying to understand the new JavaScript world with React and all its toys (moving from my background of PHP and other 'old-school' server-side rendered solutions), I hit problems similar to this.

This particular example isn't too bad -- looking at that line, it would be clear to me that I'm missing 'npm', and the solution is obvious -- find out what npm is, and get it installed. But the things that really bit me were tons of examples of JavaScript, which included strange lines like 'import', and I had no idea how to get my website's JavaScript to understand what an import is or any of the other syntax. Nothing would work! I didn't realise there was a whole ecosystem around how to build your code so that it can make use of these things. Every guide assumed I had things going, and I just didn't understand that I needed this other infrastructure in place first before I could do anything.

I’d recommend reading this[1] (fantastic) article that came out a few years ago. It’s exactly the kind of guide you’re looking for.

[1] https://peterxjang.com/blog/modern-javascript-explained-for-...

Some notes of things that have changed in the last five years:

- bundling is (almost) no longer needed for simple import/export as we now have a native module capability (esmodules). The biggest issue you’re likely to have here is waiting for any dependencies you have to upgrade from common js to esmodules.

- transpiling is not as necessary unless you explicitly have to support IE11, or require something in the latest ecmascript spec.

It really speaks to the maturation of front-end development that after five years that article is still fairly accurate.

About time too - I’m too old to put up with that level of churn anymore.

As long as you have npm installed it'll work. Npm create is an alias for the npm init command [1], which will look for a package with the prefix 'create-', install it, and run its bin file. It looks like this is the file that ends up being run: https://github.com/withastro/astro/blob/main/packages/create....

[1] https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v8/commands/npm-init

> As long as you have npm installed it'll work.

Exactly proving my original point.

If you don't have npm installed, just stay as far as you can from this :D

Seriously, JS static website generators are the worst... use something written in any compiled language so you just download and run a single binary, no messing around with npm and millions of dependencies.

Take your pick here: https://jamstack.org/generators/

PHP is pretty great. No NPM needed

PECL? PEAR? Composer? ...

Exactly. PHP (like every other modern programming language) has its own dependency management tools. Node is actually better than many in this respect because npm comes bundled with Node — it's not something you have to install separately.

Ironically, Composer actually lists npm as one of its inspirations [1].

> "...Composer is strongly inspired by node's npm and ruby's bundler."

[1] https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md

Well obviously you'll need npm to use a command that begins with npm. If someone gave you a terminal command to run that begins with curl, you'd be expected to have curl installed. This seems like pure pedantry.

Take a look for example at the rust installation steps [1]. They tell you to run the following command in your terminal: "curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh". They don't tell you to first make sure you have curl installed (or sh for that matter).

[1] https://www.rust-lang.org/learn/get-started

> in any terminal

I agree; the "in any terminal" part is paternalistically redundant - any software developer who recognizes the npm command will know what to do with it.

Because it is written in JS it assumes you have NodeJS installed. npm is the package manager bundled in with NodeJS.

just use yarn bro, or npx

the reason node based documentation sucks so bad, is that generally by the time you read it, it's already deprecated.

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