Installation of ghe ESP8266 Arduini core: GitHub - esp8266/Arduino: ESP8266 core for Arduino
Documentation: GitHub - esp8266/Arduino: ESP8266 core for Arduino
Remember, you must press the Reset + Flash button before attempting to upload from the IDE.
https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino/blob/master/doc/boards.md#nodemcu-10
Acording to the manufacturer, "with a micro USB cable, you can connect NodeMCU devkit to your laptop and flash it without any trouble". This is more or less true: the board comes with a CP2102 onboard USB to serial adapter which just works, well, the majority of the time. Sometimes flashing fails and you have to reset the board by holding down FLASH + RST, then releasing FLASH, then releasing RST. This forces the CP2102 device to power cycle and to be re-numbered by Linux.+
Ray