Introduction

For this application we’re going to build off of the work done in the Python workshop. We’ll use the example of an ALA conference title mashup script to turn it into a simple web application. Along the way we will cover many of the topics you’ll need to get started with building fully dynamic web applications.

Fork the base repository to your GitHub account

To get started, we’ll make a copy of the project repository where we can start to build the application. The only thing that is included in this repository is a copy of the talk_mashup_bot.py script from the Python Twitter Bots workshop and related supporting files. We’ll reuse these in our application later on!

  1. Open this URL in your web browser: https://github.com/kbeswick/jumpstart-webdev
  2. Click the “Fork” button in the very top right corner of the page to create a copy of this repository to your own account
  3. After this completes, you should be on your version of the repository - to verify, make sure your username is the one displaying on the top left of the page beside the repository name.
  4. Click the green “Code” button on the screen
  5. In the popup that comes up, make sure the “HTTPS” tab is highlighted
  6. Copy the URL in the popup window by either pressing the clipboard icon, or highlighting the URL and pressing CTRL+C (or cmd+C on Mac)

Clone your copy of the repository to your computer and open it in VSCode

Now that we’ve made a copy of the repository to our own GitHub, we need to clone it down to our own computers so we can start to work on our application. We’ll also open it in VSCode so we can get started.

  1. Open VSCode, then open a new window (“File” menu > “New Window”)
  2. Open a terminal window within VSCode (“Terminal” menu > “New Terminal”)
  3. In the terminal, navigate to the folder where you have cloned repositories in the other workshops (your Desktop is a common place).
  4. Run the following command in your terminal to make a local copy of the repository on your computer (replace the URL with the one you copied from GitHub above): git clone https://your_copied_repository_url
  5. Run cd jumpstart-webdev in your terminal to navigate to the project folder.
  6. To open the project folder in VSCode, run code -r . in your terminal (code is the command to open VSCode, -r means reuse the current window, and the . means open the current directory).