Installing a Python and Git Development Environment on Windows, Part 2

This is the second of a two part video. Part 1 is here and covered installing Python 3, Git for Windows, and Visual Studio Code.

Part 2 Covers:

  • Installing Visual Studio Code

  • Installing the GitHub CLI for Windows

Hello, and welcome to part two of Installing the Tools for Windows. As you can see, last time, we got through most of our lists, so this will likely be a fairly short video. But let’s go ahead and do the last two tools that we have on our list that we haven’t yet installed.

Installing Visual Studio Code

The first one is Visual Studio Code. Let’s go over to Google and find that and install it now. As you can see, we have the Download for Windows, the Stable Build, let’s get that, and we’ll click on the installer, accept the licensing agreement, click Next. We’ll install it to the default location. We’ll leave the group the same way—the folder the same way, rather.

And here, let’s go ahead and add these options to add an “Open with Code” action to Windows Explorer. That’s helpful if you want to edit a file from Windows Explorer. I don’t tend to work that way but I think it’s a handy thing to have. And let’s go ahead and create a desktop icon as well. Click Next, and install. When it finishes installing, it has an option to launch Visual Studio Code. Let’s leave that on and click Finish. And we’ll be able to see how we did.

Okay, that’s perfect. Visual Studio Code came up just fine. We can go through these options in a later video. For now, let’s close this and let’s verify that we can get to it from our command prompt. Now, if you have Windows Terminal running already, you will need to close it and restart it. So I’m going to do that now. I’m going to close it; I’m going to restart it. And at the command prompt that comes up, all we need to do is type code. Sure enough, that came up fine. Let’s close Visual Studio Code for now, and let’s move on with our final installation.

Installing the GitHub CLI for Windows

For our final installation—yes, I do sound like a broken record—we’re going to go to Google. And this time, we’re going to look for the GitHub CLI for Windows. And we’ll click on this. This should be a very straightforward, easy installation to do, and we’ll download it. And it’s an MSI. We’ll run the MSI Windows Installer program, and we’ll accept the terms, click Next, leave it in the default location and install it. That’s all there is to it. Let’s click Finish.

Once again, let’s close our terminal window and reopen it. And to test that it came back okay, let’s type G-H for GitHub, just G-H. And sure enough, we see several options about things we can do. The GitHub CLI, again, is kind of an optional install, really, but I wanted you to have it because it does make working with GitHub from the command line much, much easier. Git itself is what you really need for most of what you do, but if you’re working with looking at your repos, or you want to create a new repository and have it automatically synchronized with GitHub, the GitHub command, the CLI makes it a lot easier to do that.

So that’s all we have to do. Let’s go back into our outline. And just to briefly go over what we’ve done, we’ve installed the Windows Terminal so we can work in the same way on Windows or a Mac. We’ve installed Python for Windows. We’ve installed Git for Windows. That was our lengthy install we did at the end of the last video. Finally, we’ve installed our editor, Visual Studio Code. And our final install was the GitHub CLI for making it easier to work with GitHub.

So that was a lot of work. Give yourself a pat on the back. I know installing software is not the most exciting thing, but we got through it.

And now we’re ready to work begin our work.