Setup

⏱ Estimated time: ~20 minutes  •  🟢 No coding required yet

Welcome! This page gets your working environment ready and gives you a quick tour of it. By the end you’ll have the course open in VS Code and know your way around.

On this page:

1. Prerequisites
2. Option A — GitHub Codespaces (recommended)
3. Getting to know the environment — a quick VS Code / Codespaces tour
4. Option B — Run locally (not recommended)

Prerequisites

For this course you need three things:

1. A stable internet connection.
2. A browser (ideally Chromium-based — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, etc.).

3. A GitHub account — sign up at https://github.com/join (takes under 15 minutes; you may need to verify with your mobile phone).

   

Option A — GitHub Codespaces (recommended)

✅ This is the recommended way to take the course. A Codespace is a free, cloud-based VS Code environment (with limited free hours per month) that already has everything installed — Nextflow, Java, Docker and all the course files. Everyone gets an identical setup, so there’s nothing to configure. If in doubt, use this option.

Launch a Codespace

1. Go to the course repository: https://github.com/Eco-Flow/training/tree/main
2. Click the green < > Code button.
3. Select the Codespaces tab, then “Create codespace on main”.

1. If prompted, choose Log in with GitHub and enter your credentials.

The Codespace takes a minute or two to build the first time. When it’s ready you’ll see the VS Code editor open in your browser, similar to the screenshot below.

✅ If you see this screen, you’re in! (Your file list may look slightly different — that’s fine.) Spend a few minutes on the tour below before moving on.

❓ Stuck? If you can’t reach this screen, shout out to a tutor.

Getting to know the environment

VS Code — whether in Codespaces or on your own machine — is laid out in a few main areas. Here’s what you’re looking at in the screenshot above:

Below are the handful of skills you’ll actually use during the course. Try each one now.

🖥️ Find and open the Terminal

The terminal is where you’ll type the commands in Part 1 and run pipelines later. It lives in the Panel at the bottom, under the TERMINAL tab.

If you don’t see it, open a new one in any of these ways:

• Menu ☰ → Terminal → New Terminal, or
• Keyboard shortcut Ctrl + ` (the backtick key, top-left of most keyboards), or
• Command Palette (see below) → type “Terminal: Create New Terminal”.

▶️ Try it: open a terminal and type pwd then press Enter. In Codespaces it should print a path ending in eco-flow-training — that’s where the course exercises expect you to be.

📂 Open and edit a file

Click any file in the Explorer to open it in the editor. Make a change, then save with Ctrl + S (Cmd + S on a Mac). Unsaved files show a dot ● on their tab.

For a Markdown file like this one, you can see a nicely-formatted preview: open the file and click the preview icon (top-right of the editor) or press Ctrl + Shift + V.

⬇️ Download a file to your own machine

Because Codespaces runs in the cloud, files live on the server — but you can pull them down whenever you need to:

1. In the Explorer, right-click the file you want.
2. Choose Download.
3. Your browser saves it to your computer’s Downloads folder.

💡 You’ll use this in Part 1 to download your saved command history. To go the other way (from your machine into the Codespace), drag a file into the Explorer or right-click and choose Upload.

🎨 The Command Palette — your shortcut to everything

Press Ctrl + Shift + P (Cmd + Shift + P on a Mac) to open the Command Palette. Start typing the name of almost any action (“terminal”, “preview”, “download”…) and run it without hunting through menus. When in doubt, this is the fastest way to find a feature.

💾 Saving your work and ending a session

Your Codespace keeps your files between sessions, but closing the browser tab ends the session, so save anything important first (Ctrl + S). You can reopen or manage your Codespaces any time at https://github.com/codespaces.

✅ Orientation checklist

Before you head to Part 1, make sure you can:

• Open a terminal and run pwd
• Open a file from the Explorer and preview this page as formatted Markdown
• Download a file to your machine (right-click → Download)
• Open the Command Palette (Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + P)

New to VS Code and want more? The official intro is here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/userinterface

Option B — Run locally (not recommended)

⚠️ This is not the preferred way to take the course. Codespaces (Option A) gives everyone an identical, pre-configured environment. Running locally means installing and troubleshooting the tools yourself, and results can vary between machines — this is especially fiddly on Windows. Only choose this route if you cannot use Codespaces, and be ready to debug your own setup.

If you still want to run locally, you will need the following installed on your machine:

1. VS Code — the editor used throughout the course.
2. Git — to clone the course repository.
3. Java 17+ — required by Nextflow (check with java -version).
4. Nextflow — the workflow engine (you’ll also (re)install it as an exercise in Part 1).
5. Docker — used to run the nf-core RNA-Seq pipeline containers. Make sure Docker Desktop is running.

💡 Windows users: install and run everything inside the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) rather than native Windows, so the UNIX commands in Part 1 behave as described.

Then clone the course repository (the HTTPS URL is under the green Code button → Local tab) and open it in VS Code:

git clone https://github.com/Eco-Flow/training.git
cd training/eco-flow-training
code .

Unlike Codespaces, your terminal will not start inside eco-flow-training automatically, and the absolute paths shown in the exercises (e.g. /workspaces/training/eco-flow-training) will be different on your machine. That’s fine — just make sure you cd into the eco-flow-training folder before starting the exercises. What matters is that pwd ends in eco-flow-training.

Once you can open the repo in VS Code and java -version and nextflow info both work, you’re ready to begin.

Next

You’re set up! On to the command line.

Head back to the menu → click here

Head to Part 1 → click here