Bean Machine is a web application that plays audio and video in a browser from files served from a server. The server can be on a local intranet or on the Internet. This software package contains both components: the server software, and the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that run in the browser.

The Bean Machine server component is written in a programming language called Go. Go does not (yet) come installed by default as part of your computer’s operating system, but you can install it for free.

To run Bean Machine, you will need to download the Go programming language for your computer. Download the latest stable version of the installer package, and install it.

Then you’ll need to build the server executable for your machine.

First, open a command shell terminal. (That’s Terminal on macOS, or CMD.EXE on Windows.)

Second, change the shell’s working directory to the location of this README.md file. This example assumes you’ve downloaded it into your Downloads folder, which you probably have.

cd ~/Downloads/bean-machine
go build

cd %HOMEPATH%\Downloads\bean-machine
go build

The result of this process will be a file named bean-machine (macOS and Linux) or bean-machine.exe (Windows). This is the Bean Machine server program. Its purpose is to build a catalog of your music collection, and then to serve that catalog and your music to web browsers. The actual music-playing user interface appears in the browser.

Run bean-machine, to tell it to build the music catalog and run the web server. Tell it the pathname of your music directory. On macOS, many Linux systems, and Windows, that is most likely to be your Music folder.

./bean-machine -m ~/Music catalog serve

.\bean-machine.exe -m %HOMEPATH\Music catalog serve

bean-machine will catalog your music directory (this might take a while) and then print out the URL(s) by which you can access it.

Finally, note that when you browse to your Bean Machine server, your browser will warn you about the ‘invalid’ server security certificate that Bean Machine uses. Bean Machine creates a new certificate for itself as part of starting the server, but the certificate has not been signed by an authority your browser knows about. Normally, you shouldn’t expect to see invalid certificates on real, public internet sites.

But for running servers (like Bean Machine) on your own computer at home, it’s OK, and you can click through this warning without hurting anything. Although you know you are talking to your own server, the browser doesn’t ‘know’ that, and so it warns you out of an abundance of caution.

(For public web sites like facebook.com or google.com, such a warning would be important and real, and you should not click through it!)

In the main page of the application, you can show a help screen by typing ? or h.