Getting Started

This will quickly take you through the process of bringing up a Hello World chute in a virtual machine on your computer.

NOTE: These instructions assume you are running Ubuntu. The steps to launch a virtual machine may be different for other environments.

Environment setup

These steps wil download our router image and launch it a virtual machine.

  1. Install required packages:

    sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm

  2. Download the latest image (paradrop_router.img.gz) from our releases.

  3. Extract the image:

    gunzip paradrop_router.img.gz

  4. Launch the VM:

    sudo kvm -m 1024 \
-netdev user,id=net0,hostfwd=tcp::8000-:8000,hostfwd=tcp::80-:80 \
-device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0 -drive file=paradrop_router.img,format=raw

Please note: there is no username/password to log into the system. Please follow the steps in the next section to access your router through paradrop.org.

Activating your Router

Follow these steps the first time you start a new physical or virtual Paradrop router. Activation associates the router with your account on paradrop.org so that you can manage the router and install chutes from the chute store.

  1. Make an account on paradrop.org if you do not have one.
  2. From the Routers tab, click Create Router. Give your router a unique name and an optional description to help you remember it and click Submit.
  3. On the router page, find the “Router ID” and “Password” fields. You will need to copy this information to the router so that it can connect.
  4. Open the router portal at http://localhost. Click the “Activate the router witha ParaDrop Router ID” button and enter the information from the paradrop.org router page. If the activation was successful, you should see checkmarks appear on the “WAMP Router” and “ParaDrop Server” lines. You may need to refresh the page to see the update.

Installing Chutes

  1. Make an account on paradrop.org and make sure you have an activated, online router.
  2. Go to the Chute Store tab on paradrop.org. There you will find some public chutes such as the hello-world chute. You can also create your own chutes here.
  3. Click on the hello-world chute, click Install, click your router’s name to select it, and finally, click Install.
  4. That will take you to the router page again where you can click the update item to monitor its progress. When the installation is complete, an entry will appear under the Chutes list.
  5. The hello-world chute starts a webserver, which is accessible at http://localhost:8000. Once the installation is complete, test it in a web browser.