Preparing the environment

Before touching the project, I prepared the environment. It’s boring but it saves you headaches later: if Git and Node are not set up properly, things fail in weird, hard-to-understand ways.

Node.js and npm

Astro needs a recent Node.js. I checked it in the terminal:

node --version
npm --version

In my case: v22.23.2 and 10.9.8. If you don’t have it, install it from nodejs.org and check again.

Git

It’s also a good idea for Git to know who you are for commits:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "your-email@example.com"

A detail that surprised me: when using a folder on another drive (J:\), Git returned detected dubious ownership. The fix is to add that folder as a safe directory:

git config --global --add safe.directory J:/path/to/project

The repository on GitHub

I created the repository on GitHub (public, main branch by default). Then, from the project folder, I connected it:

git init -b main
git remote add origin https://github.com/your-user/your-repo.git

The -b main creates the branch with the name GitHub uses by default, so there are no surprises when pushing.

Privacy tip: if the repo is going to be public, on GitHub you can use the noreply email so your personal email never appears in the commit history:

git config user.email "12345678+your-user@users.noreply.github.com"

With the environment ready, in the next part we create the Astro project.