Learning Vue and Firebase: Day 1 Installation Disaster

Introduction

So this isn't exactly in line with my plans for this site, but since this site's been in progress for decades now with nothing in particular it's being used for, I'm going to use it to journal my progress learning programming for the first time.

Since it's my first time I don't claim to be a pro, but I think that documenting the difficulties I have might help someone someday, or at least help myself figure out where I'm going wrong.

Picking Vue.js and Firebase

I've always wanted to learn some form of JavaScript, and after a quick search around the web it seems like the top three frameworks are:

• Vue
• React
• Angular (3?)

Firebase on the other hand is from what I understand similar to AWS but free for small users. We'll see how it goes.

INSTALLING VUE.JS

This had to be the biggest pain in the butt I've ever experienced.

So here are the steps I had to take with some information in the middle:

1. Go to https://nodejs.org/en/ and install version 12.18.3 LTS, which is the latest version. Run as admin and use all the defaults. This *should* update your PATH file, which allows you to use global variables but may not...
2. In admin version of Windows Powershell, run the following after navigating to where Node.js was installed

• Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
• npm install
• npm init --y
• I tried using npm init but the dialogues weren't coming up so I needed to just use the default --y 
• npm install -g @vue/cli
• These spaces really matter
• Use commands vue --version and npm --version to determine whether it's installed correctly

After 2 hours on Stack Overflow searching up error messages I finally got to see the most beautiful sight:

PS C:\Program Files\nodejs> vue --version

@vue/cli 4.5.3

Beautiful...now time for the next step...