Choosing Your Tools

Before diving in, let’s get your environment ready. This course is hands-on — you’ll be running real commands from lesson one.

Required

Claude Code

Claude Code is a CLI tool from Anthropic that gives Claude direct access to your terminal, file system, and development tools.

Requirements:

• Node.js 18+ installed
• A Claude Pro ($20/mo) or Max ($100/mo) subscription
• A terminal (VS Code terminal, Windows Terminal, iTerm2, etc.)

Install:

npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code

Verify:

claude --version

A Code Editor

You’ll want a code editor open alongside Claude Code. We recommend:

• VS Code — free, great terminal integration, works everywhere
• Cursor — VS Code fork with built-in AI (good complement to Claude Code)

Git

Version control is essential. Claude Code works directly with git.

git --version

If you don’t have it: git-scm.com

Recommended

A Cloudflare Account

Free tier is plenty for this course. You’ll use it for:

• Pages — static site hosting
• Workers — serverless functions
• D1 — SQLite database
• KV — key-value storage
• R2 — object storage

Sign up at dash.cloudflare.com

GitHub Account

For pushing code, creating PRs, and using GitHub MCP integrations.

Optional but Useful

• Notion — we’ll show MCP integration with Notion
• A WordPress local dev environment — if you want to follow the WordPress-specific lessons (we use LocalWP)

Verifying Your Setup

Once you have Claude Code installed, run:

claude

You should see Claude’s interactive prompt. Type a simple message to confirm it’s working:

> What directory am I in?

Claude should read your current directory and respond. If that works, you’re ready to go.