How to Set Up a Vue Development Environment

If you’re going to do any serious amount of work with Vue, it’ll pay dividends in the long run to invest some time in setting up your coding environment. A powerful editor and a few well-chosen tools will make you more productive and ultimately a happier developer.

In this post, I’m going to demonstrate how to configure VS Code to work with Vue. I’m going to show how to use ESLint and Prettier to lint and format your code and how to use Vue’s browser tools to take a peek at what’s going on under the hood in a Vue app. When you’ve finished reading, you’ll have a working development environment set up and will be ready to start coding Vue apps like a boss.

Let’s get to it!

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Installing and Setting Up Your Editor

I said that I was going to be using VS Code for this tutorial, but I’m afraid I lied. I’m actually going to be using VSCodium, which is an open-source fork of VS Code without the Microsoft branding, telemetry and licensing. The project is under active development and I’d encourage you to check it out.

It doesn’t matter which editor you use to follow along; both are available for Linux, Mac and Windows. You can download the latest release of VSCodium here, or download the latest release of VSCode here and install it in the correct way for your operating system.

Throughout the rest of this guide, for the sake of consistency, I’ll refer to the editor as VS Code.

Add the Vetur Extension

When you fire up the editor, you’ll notice a set of five icons in a toolbar on the left-hand side of the window. If you click the bottom of these icons (the square one), a search bar will open up that enables you to search the VS Code Marketplace. Type “vue” into the search bar and you should see dozens of extensions listed, each claiming to do something slightly different.

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