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Setting up the development environment

FreeSewing provides a development environment that visualizes your design for you. This tutorial is for the stand-alone development environment, not the monorepo development environment (which you may have set up if you followed a getting started tutorial).

To set it up, I will open a terminal and enter the following command:

npx @freesewing/new-design

It will ask if it is ok to install the development environment in a new folder named freesewing. You can accept the default, or pick a different folder name if you prefer.

It will also ask what package manager you would like to use. Here too the default (npm) is fine., unless you are certain you have yarn installed.

After answering these questions, files will be downloaded, dependencies installed, and it will also initialize a git repository for you (if you have git on your system).

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This will take a few minutes because the development environment has a number of dependencies that need to be downloaded.

When it's ready, you can enter the freesewing directory that was just created and run npm run dev:

cd freesewing
npm run dev

Or if you want to use yarn as package manager:

cd freesewing
yarn dev

Now open a browser and go to http://localhost:8000

If all goes well, we'll should see this landing page:

The FreeSewing development environment

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More detailed setup tutorials are available

This pattern design tutorial contains only an abbreviated overview of the setup process. For more detailed instructions, please refer to one of our setup tutorials:

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Need help?

If you run into any issues, head over to FreeSewing.org/support which lists the various ways in which you can get help.