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Comment by timdorr | Hacker News Reader

While this is cool, why does it have to be on a Raspberry Pi? Could this not be a VM (VirtualBox, since it's free) image as well? That way there's no hardware to buy and you simply install one program to run the image.

A great example of this is ArchiveTeam's Warrior: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior

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Coder is a node.js application, so it also work on Mac. Here's how I got it to work (assuming you have Homebrew installed):

    brew install redis node
    git clone https://github.com/googlecreativelab/coder.git
    cd coder/coder-base
    npm install
    npm start

Now login to https://localhost:8081/ (All communication happens over SSL).

Note for those who try on Linux: I've had to add a local user "pi".

Doesn't work for me:

    $ npm start

    > coder-base@0.0.1 start     /Users/seclorum/hak/coder/coder-base
    > node server.js

    no certificate found. generating self signed cert.
    WARNING: unhandled exception: Error: ENOENT, no such file or directory 'certs/server.key'

EDIT: I figured it out - turns out I had a buggy version of Postgress.app installed on my machine, which had been shipped with a poorly configured openssl binary. Removing this from my PATH, so as to be using the system version of openssl (/usr/bin/openssl) fixed the problem ..

The point is for a kid without a computer to get access to programming. Not for a kid, who already has a computer, to get access to a virtual computer to program on.

Wait, a computer is still needed to write your program, right? Or is everything done on the Pi?

Either way would work from what I understand: it's a web app that you can access from another computer on the network or the Pi itself. Of course, you'll need a monitor and keyboard.

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