Shizzle

Mozilla Bespin a cool new project that lets you edit your code online Google Docs-style. The project has so much potential and I’m really excited what’s going to happen with this.

If you want to take Bespin for a little spin you can either check out the online demo or install the whole thing on your own machine. Here is how. These instructions have been tested on OS X. I can’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work with other *nix platforms and maybe even on Windows. Let me know in the comments how it is working.

Firstly, you will need to grab the source. If you have mercurial installed then just do a 

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/bespin/

Otherwise just download the tarball and extract it somewhere in you home directory.

Once your have everything on your hard disk open a terminal and go into the Bespin directory. Then change into the backend folder

cd backend/python

and install all the requirements with 

python bootstrap.py 

This will take a few moments. After it is finished configure your installation and start the local server with the following three commands:

source bin/activate
paver create_db
paver start

If  you see something like Server starting on localhost:8080 in the terminal it means everything went well and you are good to go. Just point your browser to http://localhost:8080 and off you go.