The toolchain for the SharePoint Framework is based on open source tools and ideology. This section will walk you through all the necessary tools you will have in your toolchain when implementing solutions using the SharePoint Framework.

These tools aid you in managing your projects, building and deploying your code for test and production environments, and running your code locally when doing initial debugging and testing. If you've been already building solutions for SharePoint before the SharePoint Framework was available, you'll see that a lot has changed from the earlier SharePoint development models.

In Chapter 3, Getting Started with the SharePoint Framework, we will be using the toolchain to build our first SharePoint Framework package.