---
title: 'Part 1: Prerequisites'
---

In this first part, I will get your up and running with the FreeSewing
development environment.

If you are familiar with JavaScript and its ecosystem, you can probably skip
this section. If not, I have good news and bad news (and then some more good
news) for you.

The good news is that JavaScript is an easy language to pick up. It is also a
very popular and versatile language and the skills you learn here will serve
you well.

The bad news is that the JavaScript ecosystem is vast, and unfortunately
somewhat fractured. Most of the problems people need help with are not so much
in the code itself, but rather getting everything to work together.
This is true not just for FreeSewing, but pretty much all modern JavaScript.

But, no need to despair, FreeSewing provides a development environment that
will take care of all of this for you. So you can focus on designing patterns.

If you have NodeJS on your system, getting that development environment up
and running takes only a single command:

```sh
npx @freesewing/studio
```

If you don't have NodeJS on your system --- or if you're not sure what
NodeJS is to begin with --- read on to learn how to install it.

:::danger[Windows users also need to install `git`]

The `git` command line utility is also a requirement for installing the
FreeSewing development environment. Linux and Mac systems come with
`git` pre-installed, but Windows users will need to install it manually.

Please see the
[Getting started on Windows](/tutorials/getting-started-windows/)
tutorial for instructions on how to install `git` on a Windows system.

:::
