About 5 min

Installing Atom

To get started with Atom, we'll need to get it on your system. This section will go over installing Atom on your system, as well as the basics of how to build it from source.

Installing Atom should be fairly simple. Generally, you can go to https://atom.io and you should see a download button as shown here:

The button or buttons should be specific to your platform and the download package should be easily installable. However, let's go over them here in a bit of detail.

Updating Atom

You should consider updating Atom periodically for the latest improvements to the software. Additionally, When Atom receives hotfixes for security vulnerabilities you will want to update your version of Atom as soon as possible.

Portable Mode

Atom stores configuration and state in a .atom directory usually located in your home directory (%userprofile% on Windows). You can however run Atom in portable mode where both the app and the configuration are stored together such as on a removable storage device.

To setup Atom in portable mode download the zip/tar.gz package for your systemopen in new window and extract it to your removable storage.

Portable Notes
  • The .atom directory must be writeable
  • You can move an existing .atom directory to your portable device
  • Atom can also store its Electron user data in your .atom directory - just create a subdirectory called electronUserData inside .atom
  • Alternatively you can set the ATOM_HOME environment variable to point wherever you want (you can write a .sh or .cmd script to temporarily set it and launch it from that)
  • Portable mode installations will not automatically update

Building Atom from Source

The Hacking on Atom Core section of the flight manual covers instructions on how to clone and build the source code if you prefer that option.

Proxy and Firewall Settings

Behind a Firewall?

If you are behind a firewall and seeing SSL errors when installing packages you can disable strict SSL by running:

$ apm config set strict-ssl false
Using a Proxy?

If you are using a HTTP(S) proxy you can configure apm to use it by running:

$ apm config set https-proxy <em>YOUR_PROXY_ADDRESS</em>

You can run apm config get https-proxy to verify it has been set correctly.