Hi! I'm a developer, I had never heard of scratch before but it seems quite interesting as I am a fan of design and art. I wanted to setup a scratch server in my Uni Lab, that's the task I'm given. Can any scratcher(s)/developer(s) help me out?

I was able to run scratch-gui and scratch-www locally separately. Not sure if I need other repos. The first thing that we want to do is implement login for students. Next we would be developing some custom extensions. Any help would be deeply appreciated. A step-by-step guide would be perfect. Thanks!

Hi there! This would probably be a better fit for either the Advanced Topics or Open Source Projects forum. I'll move it to the latter for now. The main thing you're missing to replicate the Scratch website would be the Scratch API, which is currently closed-source. The interface is documented here on Github if you want to implement it yourself. The community has done a lot of experimenting and come up with their own set of docs here, but I don't know of anyone who has re-implemented the whole thing. I'm not sure if there's anything else you're missing, so I'll leave it to the folks here to fill in any missing gaps.

I will say, I'm curious I'm curious what you're trying to accomplish by hosting your own server, since I don't think it's typical approach! If re-implementing our API isn't something you want to set out to do (I wouldn't blame you if it's not) you might want to check out our educator resources for guidance on how to use Scratch in an educational setting.

Hey Harakou,

I'm not sure if would I need a scratch API. I'm not trying to read and write data from the scratch server hosted by MIT. I'm trying to host a setup locally using the open source code provided where students can create and share projects and have a login.Thanks for the response nonetheless!

I read on the scratch website that schools and other organizations are using Scratch. Do you have an idea how are they using it in their lab/classrooms?

Do you want to operate your own scratch website specifically for your university/school?

imdoom wrote:

I'm not sure if would I need a scratch API. I'm not trying to read and write data from the scratch server hosted by MIT. I'm trying to host a setup locally using the open source code provided where students can create and share projects and have a login.Thanks for the response nonetheless!

Right, the API is the backend for the website that the frontend (scratch-www) communicates with. So if you wanted to run your own copy of the website, you'd need a server running that replicates our backend, or at least the parts that you want to be functioning. (Unfortunately, our backend is closed-source.) Check out how scratch-www fits in with our other repos.

imdoom wrote:

I read on the scratch website that schools and other organizations are using Scratch. Do you have an idea how are they using it in their lab/classrooms?

I'm not as familiar with that myself, but like I said, our Educators page has a lot of info on how you can do that, including educator resources, information on teacher accounts, and places you can connect with other organizations using Scratch in a school environment.

If you're still wondering, you might be interested in how adacraft does it. Adacraft is a scratch mod by @ogadaki but I think the systems should be similar as it is a fork of scratch. Maybe store the project as an sb3 and just store it like any other file or something?

god286 wrote:

If you're still wondering, you might be interested in how adacraft does it. Adacraft is a scratch mod by @ogadaki but I think the systems should be similar as it is a fork of scratch. Maybe store the project as an sb3 and just store it like any other file or something?

And I would be happy to help. So, @imdoom (or anyone else), if you have any question don't hesitate.

imdoom wrote:

I read on the scratch website that schools and other organizations are using Scratch. Do you have an idea how are they using it in their lab/classrooms?

That is by using an educators account. It is all done on the scratch website and doesn't use the scratch API.
Also for the accounts do you mean scratch accounts? Because you can use scratch auth projects to use real scratch accounts on your website.

Why you want to write a custom server, can't you whitelist scratch.mit.edu. If internet itself is not there, check the Scratch Desktop kind of software. Writing and implementing the scratch server API is a waste of time.