Initial project setup

The initial setup isn't much different from what we did in the previous Event Registration app. Open up the starter files from Chapter04 folder in VSCode and create a .env file. From the .env.example file, you should know that, for this application, we only need a single environment variable, NODE_ENV, whose value will be production only for the production environment. For development, we can simply assign it some other value, such as dev.

Once you have created your .env file, open the terminal in VSCode or your native terminal (navigate to project root folder) and run npm install to install all the dependencies for the project. After that, run npm run webpack in the terminal, which should start the Webpack dev server.