Technical requirements

To follow along, you'll just need a computer: macOS, Windows, or Linux are all adequate operating systems. You'll also want to create a Heroku account. Heroku is a cloud application platform we'll use to deploy Metabase at the end of the chapter. You can sign up for an account at https://www.heroku.com/.

Throughout this book, we'll be using a program called Git. Git is a version control system that helps track code changes in a project. Git has a high learning curve for beginners, and while we will not be covering any Git tutorials in this book, I intend to make the examples easy to follow. No prior knowledge of Git is required.

Often in this book, we'll use GitHub (https://github.com/) in conjunction with Git. GitHub is a code-hosting platform that relies heavily on the Git program. While Git helps you track changes to your code base, GitHub allows you to host that code online, so that others can access, edit, or contribute to it. The Metabase project lives on GitHub. That means that if you wanted to, you could contribute to the building of Metabase. Later in this book, we'll learn how you can get involved in that, even if you don't know how to program.

There is a GitHub repository for this book, too, at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Metabase-Up-and-Running. I'll use this repository to share code examples and data useful to you as you work through the examples in the book.