Verified node 24.22.2pnpm 10.34.9
You're going to build Klippy, a small assistant that lives on the internet. It answers questions with Claude, and over the next courses it gets tools, a memory and a face. This lesson gets your machine ready. It takes about ten minutes, and you only do it once.
You need four things: a terminal, an editor, Node and pnpm. Here's what each one is for.
A terminal is a window where you type commands instead of clicking. Every build step in these courses is a command you type there. On a Mac it's the Terminal app. On Windows, use Windows Terminal with WSL (Ubuntu), so the commands here work as written. On Linux you already have one.
When a lesson shows a command, type it and press Enter. Lines that start with $ in recorded output are commands; the lines under them are what came back. Don't type the $.
You'll read and change code in an editor. Any will do. If you don't have one, install VS Code: it's free, and its built-in terminal (View → Terminal) means you can keep code and commands in one window.
Klippy is written in TypeScript, which is JavaScript with types. Your laptop needs a program to run JavaScript tools outside a browser. That program is Node, a runtime. Install the LTS version (Node 24) from nodejs.org. LTS means long-term support: the one that gets fixes for years.
Check it worked:
That's our recorded output. Any v24. number is fine. If you see command not found, close the terminal, open a new one and try again: a terminal only sees programs that were installed before it opened.
Klippy uses other people's code, like Cloudflare's tools and the AI SDK. They come as packages, and a package manager downloads them and keeps their versions straight. We use pnpm: it's fast, and it handles a repo with several apps in it well, which is how Klippy grows.
You don't install pnpm by hand. Node includes Corepack, a small helper that fetches the exact pnpm version a project asks for. Switch it on once:
corepack enable pnpm -v
We ran pnpm -v inside a folder whose package.json pins pnpm 10.34.9, so Corepack fetched that version first. That's the notice on the first line. Outside a project you may see another 10.x number, and that's fine: from the next lesson, Klippy's package.json pins the version for you.
If corepack enable says permission denied, your Node was installed for all users. Run sudo corepack enable on Mac or Linux, or open the terminal as administrator on Windows.
Each lesson ends at a git tag in Klippy's repository, so you can catch up or compare if you get stuck. Check that git is there:
git --versionAny version prints a line like git version 2.x. If it isn't installed, a Mac offers to install it the first time you run that command, and on Linux or WSL it's sudo apt install git.
You're set up. In the next lesson you'll make Klippy's folder and your first Worker.