Setting up the open source Mechanical MOOC, part one

Step 2 for dumb demo, set up a site where I can post content and syllabi.
For this, I am following the popular Learning Creative Learning course and using Mechanical MOOC, and open-source version of the massive open online course software used by Udacity and Coursera and EdX and others. Their github page is well-documented and made this process a breeze — maybe 30 minutes because I had to install basic things (this is starting from a clean xubuntu installation, well, running on liveusb actually).

anndd it’s live! http://cryptic-sea-7936.herokuapp.com/ for the next few hours/days, at least.

Sentences highlighted are the non-liveblog, what you actually want to do steps.

  • Spin up an xubuntu liveusb… I really don’t want to try to do webdev on a windows machine

https://github.com/p2pu/mechanicalmooc/wiki/Getting-it-Running#wiki-heroku
step 1: git clone https://github.com/p2pu/mechanicalmooc

  • Install git
  • It’s a fairly old xubuntu liveusb (12.10 from lsb_release -a) so some repository 404s initially

sudo apt-get install git

Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/git/git_1.7.10.4-1_i386.deb  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.201 80]
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with –fix-missing?

sudo apt-get update –fix-missing
sudo apt-get install git
okay works now.
git clone https://github.com/p2pu/mechanicalmooc

step 2: Spin up a new instance of the heroku cedar stack

  • https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/cedar Needs CLI

step 3: git push to heroku instance

  • git push git@heroku.com:cryptic-sea-7936.git
    Permission denied (publickey).
    fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
  • Right, I need to do the remote key thing https://help.github.com/articles/generating-ssh-keys
    cd ~/.sshssh-keygen -t rsa -C "your_email@example.com"

    cat id_rsa.pub

  • Copy paste into https://dashboard.heroku.com/account and hit “Add new key”
  • cd ~/mechanicalmooc/
    git push git@heroku.com:cryptic-sea-7936.git
    fatal: ‘master’ does not appear to be a git repository
  • lol not a valid command. okay time to refresh flaky memory
    http://gitref.org/remotes/
    enh that is too manpage like for me to understand, try this instead
    http://git-scm.com/book/ch2-5.html
  • Well this works, hope it doesn’t mess anything up.
    git remote add heroku git@heroku.com:cryptic-sea-7936.git
    git push heroku master
  • visit site http://cryptic-sea-7936.herokuapp.com/

Hrm, okay, now to fix things up