Meeting requirements and installing Claude Code - Claude Tutorial

- Let's walk through what it takes to get Claude installed and discuss some of the requirements. You can run Claude code on Mac OS, Windows, Ubuntu, or Linux. Just make sure your system is fairly up to date. If you have Windows, you'll want to use WSL that lets you run a Linux environment inside Linux. You're also going to need to use Node.js version 18 or higher. It's also always helpful if you have get installed, that's going to help with version control. If you're using WSL, you may want to run the npm config set ox Linux command. That's going to configure the operating system and set it to Linux so that you can use these commands. I'm on a Mac, so I'm going to use my terminal application, and I'm going to run the following command. That's going to be npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code. To test out Claude code, I've added a simple repository to this URL. To use this, you can simply go to the code menu and download this as a zip file, or you can also clone the repository. I've already done that and I have it right here in my desktop. This is a very simple React project and what I want to do is switch to that folder. So I'm going to my machine's desktop and I've renamed the folder codedemo just to make it simpler, and once I'm in that folder, I can issue the Claude command. It'll ask you if you trust the files in this folder the first time you do this, then we can say yes and proceed. The first time you do this, you may also need to do some configuration to make sure that you have the right account and it might require you to get a proper API key in order to work with this project. You can run a number of commands while in here. I'll ask you to summarize this project. This is going to scan your repo, analyze your files, and show you a quick summary of your project. If you use the slash, you'll get a dropdown with some additional commands that you can run and you can run the init command. This will add a new claude.md file for you, which will have some documentation. For this project, Claude is suggesting that I look up any ES link configuration files in the root of my project. This is going to be part of how it analyzes code and it's there to gather some context about your project's tool. I'm going to go ahead and say, yes, this file is going to provide guidance to Claude and it's a type of read me document with information about the project. This will keep Claude focused on the structure of your project. Let's go ahead and ask it to automatically create these files. Initializing and creating the claude.md file is critical and it should be one of the first things you do with every project. We'll explore a set of commands that will help you fine tune Claude called slash commands next.