Getting started with ReasonML

The Reason website has a great quickstart guide as well as tutorials for setting up editor support. First, install NodeJS to get the node package manager (npm). Then, run the following:

npm install -g bs-platform
cd <your-projects-folder>
bsb –init learning-tydd-reason –theme basic-reason
cd learning-tydd-reason

Now we can do an initial compile with the following command:

bsb -make-world

The preceding command builds your entire project and its dependencies recursively. It will be almost instantaneous.

It's worth mentioning that we actually recommend running the preceding shell commands (substituting in your actual projects folder, of course), because throughout this book, we're going to arrange the code examples in the form of a single project, learning-tydd-reason, and the code examples that you type into the various given file names will fit together to make up that project.

You will almost certainly want to set up editor support in Reason so that you can get things like autocompletion and go to definition. The guides available on the ReasonML website (https://reasonml.github.io/docs/en/global-installation.html) are very helpful for this. Currently, Visual Studio Code (http://code.visualstudio.com/) is the best-supported editor; you will probably get the best results from using that.