Your Deno Dev Environment

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How to set up your development environment for Deno

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To install Deno, we'll run curl. So we're going to grab this curl command from the documentation.

curl -fsSL https://deno.land/install.sh | sh

We'll go to our terminal, we'll paste that in, hit enter, and this will install Deno in the background to the most recent version. When I do this, it'll ask me if I want to add Deno to the path. We'll go ahead and say yes, and you can add these setup completions here.

And now we have installed this to our path. If you're on Windows, there are installation instructions for you here in the documentation.

To generate a Deno project from scratch, let's go ahead and type deno init MyDenoProject. This is going to create that folder for me. I can then cd into that folder. Now if we open this up in VSCode, this has created a deno.json file, a main_test.ts file, and a main.ts file. So this is a quick way of getting started.

If you're using VSCode, there are a few configuration options that you'll want to set up. So we'll go up here to code and settings. We'll select extensions. So over here in your extensions, you're going to search for Deno, and then we'll select the one that has been created by Denoland here.

{
  "deno.enable": true,
}

We're going to run install, and this will install our Deno land extension. Next we'll type command shift P. This will open up our command palette here, and we can type deno initialize workspace configuration. We're going to go ahead and click that. That's going to generate this VSCode folder with settings. This is going to enable hints and autocomplete and all of that right here in the code editor. So if I start to type anything from deno serve, for example, that's going to give me a look at what the expected parameters of that function are. That's very helpful.

This is also going to give us hints when importing. So we'll say import star as path from JSR at standard slash path.

import * as path from "jsr:@std/path";

So all of them are listed there. Pretty cool. And then if we wanted to do something for a remote module, something like OpenAI from https://deno.land/x/openai@v4.67.1/mod.ts (or now, even better, from JSR)

import OpenAI from "jsr:@openai/openai";

This is then going to give us the standard library as well as X for all of those third party APIs. So you can actually drill down into OpenAI from here. You just need to select the version, so we'll say OpenAI at v461. And then you can even drill down into that individual file.

If you take a look at the documentation here, this will guide you through the process of setting up your own unique environment. There are shell completions that you can add, so depending on which CLI tool you're using, you can set this up over here, whether it's Bash or PowerShell or ZShell or whatever it might be.