Step By Step Guide To Setup Your SharePoint Framework Development Environment

In this post, I will guide you through a step by step process to prepare your SharePoint framework environment. But before that, we will get into the definition of SPFx.

As per the Microsoft definition, The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a page and Web Part model that provides full support for the client side development, easy integration with SharePoint data and open-source modeling and you can use modern web technology and tools in your preferred environment and apps that are responsive and mobile ready from day one. The SharePoint Framework works for SharePoint online and SharePoint On-Premises 2016 Feature-Pack 2 & SharePoint 2019.

Traditionally, we use Visual Studio to develop the web parts and solution where the SharePoint binaries are installed, but SharePoint framework is contrary to traditional development strategy. SPFx can be set up at any development environment like Linux, Mac OS.

In this article, I used the Windows 7 X64-bit machine to set up my SPFx development environment.

As the first step, we need to install Node.js. You can download using the following URL https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v8.x/ and npm (Node Package Manager) module and it will make it available from the PowerShell command line. Currently, Long Term Support (LTS) version 8 and 10 only support SPFx.

It’s just like a normal installation by clicking Next -> Next ->and Finish

Enter the below mentioned line in the PowerShell to verify the version of node.js.

Install npm(Node Package Manager)

Use the following powershell code to install npm.