Set up your development directory

Setting up a dedicated dev directory is a life saver. Since all the data under this directory will be backed up using GitHub, you can safely configure your antivirus, cloud sync, or backup software to ignore it. This will help greatly reduce CPU, disk, and network utilization. As a full-stack developer, you're likely to be multitasking a lot, so avoiding unnecessary activity will have a net positive impact on performance, power, and data consumption on a daily basis, especially if your development environment is a laptop that is either resource starved or you wish to squeeze as much battery life as possible when you're on the move.

Creating a dev folder directly under the c:\ drive is very important, because Windows, or rather NTFS, isn't able handle file paths longer than 260 characters. This may seem adequate at first, but when you install npm packages in a folder structure that is already deep in the hierarchy, the node_modules folder structure can get deep enough to hit this limit very easily. With npm 3+, a new, flatter package installation strategy was introduced, which helps with npm-related issues, but being as close to the root folder as possible will help tremendously with any tool. In late 2016, there were reports that Microsoft may introduce an Enable NTFS long paths group policy to remedy this situation, but as of late 2017, this has not landed on Windows 10.

1. Create your dev folder using the following commands:

For Windows:

PS> mkdir c:\dev
PS> cd c:\dev

In Unix-based operating systems, ~ (pronounced tilde) is a shortcut to the current users home directory, which resides under /Users/your-user-name.

For macOS:

$ mkdir ~/dev
$ cd ~/dev

Now that your development directory is ready, let's start with generating your Angular application.