Dev environment setup

Please note: this step is absolutely optional. It aims for advanced users who want to speed up the development process with professional grade Front-End toolset shipped with Silicon. If you are not familiar with these tools and have no time to dive in you can still use plain HTML / CSS / JS to customize Silicon. In this case you can skip this and next sections. Happy coding :)

Silicon is built using modern development toolset

Node.js Official website: Is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. Node.js' package ecosystem, npm, is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world.
Npm Official website: The default package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js. Besides package managemnt capabilities it also offers a powerful feature called "Npm scripts". Scripts help with performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc. The Silicon build system consists of a variety of JavaScript files, each performing specific tasks, and associated Npm scripts that execute these files.
Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) Official website: Sass is a scripting language that is interpreted or compiled into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It is the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world. Sass gives you the power of variables, mixins, functions, etc.
Bootstrap Official website: Latest version of the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework in the world. Silicon is built on Bootstrap and heavily depends on it. Silicon has all BS5 components + bunch of own plugins and components.

This section will explain how to setup professional Front-End development environment for fast and smooth Silicon customization using these technologies.

Text Editor and Terminal (Command Line)

You can use any text editor at your disposal and available Command line tool (Command Prompt for Windows or Terminal on MacOS). Our personal preference is Visual Studio Code. It is free, has great buil-in terminal (console), built-in git client, debugging, huge extensions library and it is available for MacOS, Windows and Linux.

We highly recommend installing the VS Code Prettier plugin and configuring it as your default JavaScript formatter with the "format code on save" option enabled.

Installing Node.js and npm

In order to be able to setup Silicon development environment you will need to install Node.js and its Package Manager (npm).

Node.js is absolutely free and available for download via its official website for MacOS, Windows, Linux systems. Download Node.js and npm here.

Learn more about Node Package Manager and available packages here: https://www.npmjs.com

Installing packages necessary for Silicon development

When Node.js and npm is installed you are ready to install all dependencies necessary for Silicon development.

Inside your command line tool type: npm install

This will start the process of installing all dependencies which are listed inside Silicon/package.json file. Wait until installation is finished and jump to the next section Npm commands (scripts).