I have an Intel Compute Stick which runs Windows 10 that I am planning to use for my mirror. Getting Magic Mirror running was really easy as the manual steps outlined in the README.md file are mostly cross-platform.

But I wanted to create modules and debug them using VS Code. There are a couple hurdles there.

1. You can launch Magic Mirror using VS Code. You will have to create a launch.json file as outlined here. Make sure to read the comments as they are helpful. I will put my final file in a reply to this.
2. You may run into an exception: TypeError: Cannot read property 'name' of undefined in MagicMirror\modules\default\updatenotification\node_helper.js:35:43. The root cause of this is some Error: spawn git ENOENT messages that you may see further up in the log. I think this is an effort to check GitHub for updates…anyways it seems to do something with git and this error means it can’t find git in your path. (Basically if you opened a command prompt and typed git it would tell you that it is an unrecognized command.) Install Git from git-scm.com and that should solve it (must restart VS Code though). The installer has an option about the Windows path–choose to add Git to the path. I had GitHub Desktop installed and it apparently uses its own portable version of Git which it doesn’t add to the path.

These should get you a good running setup. Debugging works for the main code base but doesn’t seem to work for modules. That is next on my list.

When using the default NYT feed there are some reoccurring useless headlines. I have some ideas for filtering the list before cycling through for display, in order from most straightforward to craziest.

1. Remove titles equal to “Your Daily Mini Crossword”
2. Remove titles equal to “California Today”
3. Remove titles that start with “Here Are” (example that I don’t see value in is “Here Are Our Stories That Won the Biggest Awards in the Magazine World”)
4. Don’t show titles that don’t contain a verb. An alternate solution may be to include the description as subtext of the title as that often does contain something useful. (examples that I don’t see value in: “Guardians of a Vast Lake, and a Refuge for Humanity”, “Before the Wall: A Borderlands Journey”, “Feature: The Preacher and the Sheriff”) Could use something like this as a parser. May have to be provided as a service as apparently it is 261MB zipped and requires 100-500MB of RAM.

I am interested in working on this feature myself but thought I would float it for discussion first.

@aaronaxvig To run MagicMirror automatically on startup:

1. Create a .bat file and put it in the startup folder (Windows Explorer > type “shell:startup” without quotes in the address bar).
2. Set the contents of the bat file:

cd your MagicMirror Git repository folder
npm start

As I wrote about some here, it seems that the update checker has a Git dependency. (I haven’t looked at the code that carefully, please forgive me if that assumption is wrong.)

Normally this would not be a problem if you follow the install directions directly as they specify running a git clone command so naturally you must have Git. But I did it using the GitHub Desktop option, and someone could certainly use the Download As ZIP option from GitHub.com too.

I don’t really care too much since they program still runs and I have figured out how to get rid of the exception that it causes. But I thought I might pose two questions:

1. Should there be a note in the manual install instructions that Git on your path is a requirement?
2. Should there be a Git dependency in the first place for checking for updates?

My launch.json file:

{
    // Use IntelliSense to learn about possible Node.js debug attributes.
    // Hover to view descriptions of existing attributes.
    // For more information, visit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=830387
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Launch",
            "type": "node",
            "request": "launch",
            "program": "${workspaceRoot}\\js\\electron.js",
            "stopOnEntry": false,
            "args": [],
            "cwd": "${workspaceRoot}",
            "runtimeExecutable": "${workspaceRoot}\\node_modules\\.bin\\electron",
            "runtimeArgs": [
                ".",
                "--enable-logging"
            ],
            "env": {},
            "console": "integratedTerminal",
            "sourceMaps": false,
            "outDir": null
        },
        {
            "name": "Attach",
            "type": "node",
            "request": "attach",
            "port": 5858,
            "sourceMaps": false,
            "outDir": null
        }
    ]
}

I have an Intel Compute Stick which runs Windows 10 that I am planning to use for my mirror. Getting Magic Mirror running was really easy as the manual steps outlined in the README.md file are mostly cross-platform.

But I wanted to create modules and debug them using VS Code. There are a couple hurdles there.

1. You can launch Magic Mirror using VS Code. You will have to create a launch.json file as outlined here. Make sure to read the comments as they are helpful. I will put my final file in a reply to this.
2. You may run into an exception: TypeError: Cannot read property 'name' of undefined in MagicMirror\modules\default\updatenotification\node_helper.js:35:43. The root cause of this is some Error: spawn git ENOENT messages that you may see further up in the log. I think this is an effort to check GitHub for updates…anyways it seems to do something with git and this error means it can’t find git in your path. (Basically if you opened a command prompt and typed git it would tell you that it is an unrecognized command.) Install Git from git-scm.com and that should solve it (must restart VS Code though). The installer has an option about the Windows path–choose to add Git to the path. I had GitHub Desktop installed and it apparently uses its own portable version of Git which it doesn’t add to the path.

These should get you a good running setup. Debugging works for the main code base but doesn’t seem to work for modules. That is next on my list.