Preparing your development environment
1. Preparing your development environment
There are a few things that you'll need to be able to follow along and be successful in this course. Here's what you'll need. A free Snowflake trial account, a code editor, I'll be using Visual Studio Code. Optionally, the official Visual Studio Code extension for Snowflake, Snowflake CLI, Snowflake's official command line interface, access to a terminal, I'll use a terminal directly from within VS Code, and finally, access to GitHub. Having a GitHub account is nice, but it's technically optional for this course. Let's walk through setting some of these up. To start, you'll need a Snowflake account with account admin access. A free trial account will work just fine for this course. You'll also need a code editor. This is so that you can open code, read it, modify it, run it, and fully immerse yourself in the concepts that we'll cover in this course. In this course, I'll be using Visual Studio Code, also known as VS Code. You should pause the video now if you'd like to install VS Code for your operating system. In addition to it being my favorite code editor, another reason why I'm choosing to use VS Code is so that I can use the terminal and Snowflake's official VS Code extension. The extension will allow me to query Snowflake directly from VS Code. Let's quickly install it. First, open VS Code. Next, navigate to the command palette in VS Code. You can find it in the View menu. Search for or select Extensions. Next, search for Snowflake. Click on the first result and open up the Extensions page. Note that the verified publisher is Snowflake. Let's install it. Once it's installed, you'll see the icon for the extension appear in your toolbar. Click on it and the authentication model should appear. We'll stop here and show you how to log in and use the extension in a later video. You'll also need Snowflake's command line interface, Snowflake CLI. This tool will help us easily deploy a few things later in the course. To install it, you'll need PIP, Python's Package Manager. We won't demonstrate how to install Python or PIP, so be sure to pause the video and look those details up separately if you need to. Let's go ahead and install Snowflake CLI. Open up VS Code. In the terminal, type `pip install snowflake-cli-labs`. You should see some output in the terminal regarding whether or not the installation was successful. As a sanity check, type in the following command, `snow --help`. If you receive output like this, which demonstrates the syntax and usage patterns for Snowflake CLI, you'll know you've installed Snowflake CLI successfully. Finally, all of the code used in this course is available on GitHub, and the link to the repository containing the code is included in the reading. We'll frequently access GitHub when we need to grab some code for an exercise. You can certainly access and use a code without a GitHub account, but if you want to do things like start the repo or fork it, for example, you'll need a GitHub account. But having a GitHub account is technically optional. Let's clone the repo locally. In a terminal, run git clone and pass in the path to the repository. You don't have to run this now. The command is provided for you within the reading so that you can easily copy and paste it into the terminal. Excellent. The repo is cloned and now you're ready to go. Feel free to pause this video to create any accounts or download any software. Once you're set up with all of these accounts and tools, you can move on to the next video.2. Let's practice!
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