Read me!

Plan how to help other people use your app

It’s a good idea to have instructions to help other people (including future you!) set up and use your app. Having a README file in the root directory of your repository is the most popular way of doing this.

Your README should have instructions on:

• how to set up a development environment;
• how to run your tests;
• how to start the app;
• some brief guidelines on how to use the app.

You should cover all the things that are relevant to your app. Things like installing Node and MySQL are better covered by the Node and MySQL documentation: provide links to them and a little guidance.

Activity: Make a checklist

Make a checklist of all the things that someone will have to do to run your app on their machine. Think about:

• getting the git repository from GitHub to their machine (either by cloning the original or making a fork);
• installing any system software they’ll need (like NodeJS and MySQL);
• installing any dependencies your application needs (like Express and Handlebars);
• running the tests.

Write it up as a README file (you can leave off the file extension, or add .md) in your repository.