# Getting Started with Flow Types

Have a look at teh different ways installing Flow by looking at their getting started section, found here: https://flow.org/en/docs/install/

• You can choose if you want to use NPM or Yarn, and if you want to use Babel or FLow-Remove-Types to compile you code

First you’ll need to setup a compiler to strip away Flow types. You can choose between Babel and flow-remove-types.

flow-remove-types is a small CLI tool for stripping Flow type annotations from files. It’s a lighter-weight alternative to Babel for projects that don’t need everything Babel provides.

Installing and setting up Flow for a project

First install flow-remove-types with either Yarn or npm.

yarn add --dev flow-remove-types

If you then put all your source files in a src directory you can compile them to another directory by running:

yarn run flow-remove-types src/ -- -d lib/

You can add this to your package.json scripts easily.

{
  "name": "my-project",
  "main": "lib/index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "build": "flow-remove-types src/ -d lib/",
    "prepublish": "yarn run build"
  }
}

Note: You’ll probably want to add a prepublish script that runs this transform as well, so that it runs before you publish your code to the npm registry.

Flow works best when installed per-project with explicit versioning rather than globally.

Luckily, if you’re already familiar with npm or yarn, this process should be pretty familiar!

Add a devDependency on the flow-bin npm package:

yarn add --dev flow-bin

Run Flow:

yarn run flow

yarn run v0.15.1
$ flow
No errors!
✨  Done in 0.17s.