FreeSewing is a JavaScript project, so you need JavaScript to work with it. You certainly already have JavaScript on your system. In your browser to be precise. You can switch this website theme from light to dark mode, and that would not work without JavaScript.
As a user of FreeSewing, this is all you need. To develop with FreeSewing you are going to need to be able to run JavaScript outside the browser using a JavaScript runtime. Which just means a thing that can run JavaScript.
We are going to be using NodeJS in this tutorial. It is the most established of the different JavaScript runtimes. But there’s also other runtimes like Deno or Bun.
Install
If you don’t have NodeJS on your system, you can go to NodeJS.org and follow the install instructions.
NodeJS versions
You need Node.js 18 (lts/hydrogen) or higher to use FreeSewing
If you’re looking to use different versions, I can recommend using nvm which makes this very easy: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm
Test
To test whether NodeJS is installed, and see it’s version, you can run this command:
node -v
If you get the Node.js version number, that means NodeJs is installed. Yay!