Installing Claude Code on Your System

00:00 In this lesson, we’ll install Claude Code together. Since the AI world is a fast-moving world, the installation instructions might be different when you are watching this course. I will leave you the link to the Claude Code documentation in the description below.

00:16 So make sure to double-check if what you’re seeing is still up to date.

00:21 All right. On the left side, you see my terminal. That’s where we’ll type the code in a moment. And on the right side, you see a browser window where I’m at the documentation.

00:29 Right now to work with Claude Code, you need to have a Claude AI subscription, as mentioned in the former lesson, and you need Node.js in the version 18 or newer.

00:41 You can check which version of Node you’re having on your system by typing node --version. On my system, I’m having version 24, so I am way above version 18.

00:53 And that’s good. If you are below version 18, or if this command gives you an error, then you can follow the Node.js installation instructions that you also find in the Claude box.

01:06 Once you have verified that you have Node.js installed on your system and the version fits, use the npm install command from the documentation.

01:14 If you have never heard of npm, npm is in the JavaScript world, basically what pip is for us Python developers, and that means Claude Code is basically a package, not a Python package, but a TypeScript package, and you install it similarly, like how you would install a package with pip, only with npm.

01:36 Copy the command from the documentation into your terminal and press Enter. Here it is: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code.

01:51 You will see a few messages and that a bunch of packages were installed and some packages are looking for funding, but we don’t bother about this right now.

02:05 Instead, we want to make sure that Claude is on our system and running. And for that, you will first navigate into a folder where you will try out Claude Code.

02:15 I already have created a folder, so I don’t need to move anywhere. But if you just started the terminal, make sure that you’re not in your user folder. Instead, create a project folder and there may be a hello-claude-code/ folder.

02:28 One reason why you don’t want to be in your user folder or in your system’s root folder is that Claude Code will change files and you need to give Claude Code access to this folder.

02:40 So it’s a good idea to try things out in a safe folder for you.

02:45 During the installation process of Claude Code, you also installed a claude command on your system. So in order to start Claude for the first time, go to your terminal in your project directory and type claude.

02:58 And once you have hit Enter, I will see you in the next lesson where we’ll set up Claude Code together.

03:05 And if something didn’t work for you and you’re not ready for the next lesson yet, I will also leave you two links in the description below this video to the troubleshooting guide of Claude Code and to the advanced documentation, where you also see alternative installation steps.

03:22 Hopefully this works for you if the normal installation doesn’t work for you, and we’ll see each other in the next lesson.