Thimble

Thimble is Mozilla's online code editor that makes it easy to create and publish your own web pages while learning HTML, CSS & JavaScript. You can try it online by visiting https://thimble.mozilla.org (or https://bramble.mofostaging.net for our staging server).

You can read more about some of Thimble's main features in the wiki, or watch a demo video.

Thimble uses a modified version of the amazing Brackets code editor updated to run within web browsers. You can read more about how it works in this blog post.

Thimble requires a modern web browser, and we recommend using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome.

#Setup/Installation

Thimble interacts with the Publish API (source managed in publish.webmaker.org) to store users, projects, files and other content as well as publish user projects.

For authentication and user management, Thimble uses Webmaker OAuth which consists of the Webmaker ID System (source managed in id.webmaker.org) and the Webmaker Login API (source managed in login.webmaker.org).

All three services along with Thimble are bundled together using Git subtrees and can either be run together using Vagrant, or manually.

Automated Installation (Preferred Method)

Note: If you aren't able to properly run virtualization software on your machine (for e.g. some versions of Windows only allow one virtualization client to run at a time and if that isn't VirtualBox, you can't run the required VirtualBox as well. This is often a problem if you have docker installed on Windows) or are trying to host Thimble on your own, refer to the Manual Installation instructions instead.

Prerequisites for Automated Installation

In order for Thimble to be installed correctly, the following dependencies need to be installed in order:

• Node.js (version 4.6 or later) [download]
• Brackets (Bramble)
• Virtualbox (version 5.1 or later) [download]
• Vagrant (version 1.9 or later) [download]
  • Note: On Windows machines, you may need to restart your computer after installing Vagrant for it to be fully usable.

Installing Brackets (Bramble)

• Fork the Brackets repository and then clone it to your local machine using git clone --recursive https://github.com/<your_username>/brackets.git (replace <your_username> with your Github username for the account you forked Brackets into)
• In the cloned repository directory, run npm install to install the dependencies for Brackets
• Run npm run build to create the built editor files that will be used by Thimble
• Run npm start to start a server that will allow the editor to be accessed on http://localhost:8000/src -- You can find out more information about setting up Brackets locally by referring to the instructions here

Installing Thimble and Services with Vagrant

The first step is to fork and clone Thimble and navigate to the cloned directory in a terminal shell.

For the first time, to start all dependent services and Thimble, simply run:

vagrant up

Depending on your internet connection speed, this process can take a while (since it needs to download all dependencies not listed above). Once you see Express server listening on http://localhost:3500, you are ready to start using Thimble on http://localhost:3500! Any changes made to the Thimble source code on your system will automatically be reflected on http://localhost:3500.

To stop Thimble, simply press Ctrl+C twice.

To restart Thimble, run:

vagrant reload --provision

This will take less time to setup compared to the vagrant up command.

Manual Installation

You can also setup Thimble and its needed components outside Vagrant and Virtualbox. This might be needed if you want to:

• Host your own instance of Thimble
• Cannot run virtualization software on your computer

Prerequisites for Manual Installation

In order for Thimble to be installed correctly, the following dependencies need to be installed:

• Node.js 4.x or above (see note below)
  • Note: The login.webmaker.org dependency needs a node version of 4.x only while all the other dependencies work with a node version of 4.x and above. We suggest installing NVM to allow the use of multiple versions of node.
• Brackets (Bramble)
• Webmaker ID server
• Webmaker Publishing Server
• Postgresql 9.4 or above (for the publish.webmaker.org dependency)
• g++ 4.8 or above (for the login.webmaker.org dependency)
• Webmaker Login Server

The following is an abbreviated guide to getting it all set up. Please see each server's README for more details.

Manually Installing the Parts

Please note: On Windows, use copy instead of cp

####Thimble

• Fork and clone https://github.com/mozilla/thimble.mozilla.org
• Run cp env.dist .env to create an environment file
• Run npm install to install dependencies
• Run npm start to start the server

####id.webmaker.org

• Clone https://github.com/mozilla/id.webmaker.org
• Run cp sample.env .env to create an environment file
• Run npm install to install dependencies
• Run npm start to start the server

####login.webmaker.org

• Clone https://github.com/mozilla/login.webmaker.org
• Run npm install to install dependencies
• Run cp env.sample .env to create an environment file
• Run npm start the server

####PostgreSQL

• Run initdb -D /usr/local/var/postgres to initialize PostreSQL
  • If this already exists, run rm -rf /usr/local/var/postgres to remove it
• Run postgres -D /usr/local/var/postgres to start the PostgreSQL server
• Run createdb publish to create the Publish database

####publish.webmaker.org

• These steps assume you've followed the PostgreSQL steps above, including creating the publish database.
• Clone https://github.com/mozilla/publish.webmaker.org
• Run npm install to install dependencies
• Run npm run env
• Run npm run knex to seed the publish database created earlier
• Run npm start to run the server

Once everything is ready and running, Thimble will be available at http://localhost:3500/

Getting Ready to Publish

To publish locally, you'll need to do the following...

####Teach the ID server about the Publish server

• Run createdb webmaker_oauth_test to create a test database
• In your id.webmaker.org folder

  • Run node scripts/create-tables.js

  • Edit scripts/test-data.sql and replace its contents with:

      INSERT INTO clients VALUES
        ( 'test',
          'test',
          '["password", "authorization_code"]'::jsonb,
          '["code", "token"]'::jsonb,
          'http://localhost:3500/callback' )

  • Run node scripts/test-data.js

    • You'll see a INSERT 0 1 message if successful

####Sign In

To publish locally, you'll need an account.

• Go to http://localhost:3000/account
• Click Join Webmaker and complete the process, you can use a fake email
• When you've created your account, click Set permanent password instead
  • This lets you authenticate your account without needing email
• Go back to Thimble and Log In with your new account

It's that simple! You are now ready to start using Thimble to its full potential!

Localization

Please refer to the Wiki for information on the localization procedures used in Thimble.

Our Localization Community

Our localization community is awesome! They work very hard to translate Thimble so that we can expand our global reach and engage even more users in other languages. We can't thank them enough!

Invalidating CloudFront

To invalidate the production CloudFront distribution, make sure you have correct credentials set up in your env file. Then run node invalidate.js. Alternatively, if you have access to the heroku deployments, run the invalidation as a one-off dyno with heroku run npm run invalidate

Concurrency

Thimble uses the throng module to leverage Node's Cluster API for concurrency. To specify the number of server processes to start set WEB_CONCURRENCY to a positive integer value.

Contact Us

We're a friendly group, so feel free to chat with us in the "Thimble" channel on Mozilla Chat running on Mattermost. To access Mozilla Chat head to this link. Note that you will need to create an account first.

You can also download a mobile or desktop client for Mattermost here.