6 posts tagged with "Workstation"

A working Conduction workstation needs a specific combination of tools: Claude Code, Docker, Nextcloud running locally, Playwright, a handful of global Claude settings and hooks, and a working gh CLI. New developers often lose their first day (or two) to setup puzzles we've already solved internally. This six-part series gets you from a clean laptop to a working workstation in one evening. Part 1 — this one — answers the question what do you install, and why before you start clicking through installers.

This is the part with the most install commands. WSL2, Docker Desktop, VS Code with the right extensions, the language runtimes (Node, PHP, Composer), the CLIs (gh, OpenSpec), and the Playwright Chromium binary. By the end of Part 2 you'll have a working dev workstation — just without Claude Code wired up yet. That's Part 3.

With the runtimes in place from Part 2, it's time to add the AI pair programmer we actually work with: Claude Code. This part covers the install, the sign-in, and — the bit you should not skip — the mandatory global settings and safety hooks that keep Claude from running destructive shell commands without your approval. Short part, important part.

MCP — Model Context Protocol — is the standard interface Claude Code uses to call out to external tools. Inside a Conduction project, that means two things in practice: a Playwright browser pool (browser-1 … browser-7) for the testing skills, and the OpenRegister MCP server for direct access to your local Conduction data layer. A workstation isn't really complete until at least the browser pool is wired into your project root via .mcp.json. This part covers that; the OpenRegister MCP server has its own tutorial — we link to it at the bottom.

A workstation without a Nextcloud is half a workstation. Nearly every other tutorial in the academy assumes you have one running on localhost:8080. The good news: a dedicated tutorial already covers this end to end. This module is a short bridge that explains why you do it now, which Conduction apps to install once it's up, and how this part connects to the rest of the series.

Your workstation is complete. WSL2, Docker, VS Code with the right extensions, Claude Code with the safety hooks live, the MCP browser pool connected, Nextcloud running locally with the apps you need. Take a moment to feel good about that — most new Conduction developers used to lose one or two days to this; you've done it in one evening. This last part is a short map of the next tutorials, grouped by what kind of work you'll do.