General Notes

• The Reason plugin for VSCode does not function if there are spaces in your project path. In general spaces are bad anyway, so I recommend avoiding spaces. One drawback is that OneDrive forces your path to have spaces, so you likely do not want to keep your code there.
• Commit your code to a private GitHub repository. You can decide if you would like to split your code between multiple repositories (recommended) or keep everything in one repository. Note that this repo must be private. Keeping a public repo with code from this course is an honor code violation.

Mac

• Install Homebrew
• From a terminal, execute each line individually:

              
              brew install opam bzip2
              OPAMYES=1 opam init --compiler=4.08.1 --disable-sandboxing
              rehash
              eval $(opam env)
              OPAMYES=1 opam install dune reason rtop
              
            

• You can test that this worked by running rtop. You should see a big prompt for Reason. You can exit this by typing control + d.
• Install Visual Studio Code
• Launch Visual Studio Code
  • Type "command + shift + p" to bring up the command pallette. Start typing shell and sleection "Install 'code' command in PATH". This will let you launch a copy of VSCode opened to a specific directory.
  • Click the fifth button down on the left-hand pane (four boxes with on floating away).
  • In the extensions search pane, search for reason-vscode. Click Install.

Windows

We will be using Windows's linux subsystem to use ReasonML in this course.

• Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux following these steps
  • If your computer doesn't support WSL2, I found WSL1 to work just fine.
• Install Ubuntu from the Windows store
• Open the Ubuntu App and follow the steps to create a user account for the linux subsystem
• From an Ubuntu terminal, execute each line individually:

              
              sudo apt update
              sudo apt install -y build-essential bzip2 m4 openssl pkg-config rsync unzip xz-utils
              sh <(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ocaml/opam/master/shell/install.sh)
              OPAMYES=1 opam init --compiler=4.08.1 --disable-sandboxing
              eval $(opam env)
              OPAMYES=1 opam install dune reason rtop
              
            

• You can test that this worked by running rtop. You should see a big prompt for Reason. You can exit this by typing control + d.
• Install Visual Studio Code. Make sure "add to PATH is selected".
• Launch Visual Studio Code
  • On the first launch, there will be a popup about WSL. Choose Install to add support for interacting with WSL.
  • Click the fifth button down on the left-hand pane (four boxes with on floating away).
  • In the extensions search pane, search for reason-vscode. Click Install.
  • In the lower-left corner, click the green block. From the dropdown, Select Remote-WSL: New Window. This will open a new window and install the necessary components to communicate with WSL.

Linux (Raspberry Pi)

• From an terminal, execute each line individually:

              
                sudo apt update
                sudo apt install -y build-essential bzip2 m4 openssl pkg-config rsync unzip xz-utils
                sh <(curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ocaml/opam/master/shell/install.sh)
                OPAMYES=1 opam init --compiler=4.08.1 --disable-sandboxing
                eval $(opam env)
                OPAMYES=1 opam install dune reason rtop
              
            

• You can test that this worked by running rtop. You should see a big prompt for Reason. You can exit this by typing control + d.
• Install Visual Studio Code. If you are using a Raspberry Pi, you can do this part on your own computer and connect VSCode to the Pi with SSH.
• Launch Visual Studio Code
  • Click the fifth button down on the left-hand pane (four boxes with on floating away).
  • In the extensions search pane, search for reason-vscode. Click Install.
  • If you are trying to connect to a Pi from your own computer:
    • Note the ip of the Pi
    • Install the remote-ssh extension in VSCode
    • In the lower-left corner, click the green block. From the dropdown, Select Remote-SSH: Connect to Host.
    • This will open a new window and prompt you for the address. Enter <username>@<ip> and press return.
    • Confirm the SHA256 fingerprint
    • The necessary software will be install on your PI for remote development.