Step-by-step bootstrap

The next section covers detailed instructions to set up your development environment if you do not have any of the required packages. By the end of the chapter, you will have a working environment for the rest of the book (an example of a running map and an initial look at tools used to create visualizations).

A lightweight web server

Technically, most of the content we will craft can render directly in the browser without the use of a web server. However, we highly recommend you do not go ahead with this approach. Running a web server in your local development environment is extremely easy and provides several benefits:

• Geographic information, statistical data, and visualization code can be clearly separated into isolated files
• API calls can be stubbed and simulated, allowing easy integration into a full-stack application in the future
• It will prevent common mistakes when making Fetch calls to fetch geographic and statistical data (for example, the same-origin policy)

For our choice of web server and other tools in our toolbox, we will rely on a Node.js package named http-server. Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime, which is used to build fast, scalable network applications. The platform includes Node Package Manager (npm), which was created by other members of the vibrant Node.js community and allows the developer to quickly install packages of pre-built software.

To install Node.js, simply perform the following steps:

1. Go to the website http://nodejs.org.
2. Click on the INSTALL button.
3. Open the downloaded package and follow the defaults.

To test the installation, type the following in the command line:

node -v

Something similar should return:

v0.10.26 

This means we have installed the given version of Node.js.

TopoJSON is a command-line utility used to create files in the TopoJSON-serialized format. The TopoJSON format will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6, Finding and Working with Geographic Data. The TopoJSON utility is also installed via npm.

We have already installed Node.js and npm, so enter the following on the command line:

npm install -g topojson
npm install –g shapefile

Once the installation is complete, you should check the version of TopoJSON installed on your machine just as we did with Node.js:

geo2topo --version

If you see version 3.x, it means you have successfully installed TopoJSON.

TopoJSON uses node-gyp which has several dependencies based on the operating system. Please go to http://github.com/TooTallNate/node-gyp for details.

If you're using Windows, the basic steps to get TopoJSON working are as follows:

1. Install Python 2.x (3.x not supported at the time of writing this book).
2. Install Microsoft Visual Studio C++ 2012 for Desktop (Express).