First time compiling sample Plutus code in local Plutus Playground failed. Can't figure out why

Question

I've been a mainframe programmer my for decades. Never developed on small server platforms. So the biggest challenge I'm having is dealing with the nerve wracking OS setup, Github cloning, server building, nix running craziness, etc etc etc

These are the steps I accomplished leading up to my Failed Compile.

I followed The Plutus Playground Local Instance Instructions in the Plutus Env: Setup Starter Pack

1 Installed WSL (Ubuntu) (couldn't get git to work until I did this.) Tried multiple thing. But only this worked.

then:

1. Download the plutus-apps repository: git clone https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-apps COMPLETED

2. Go to the latest commit of the repository: git checkout 41149926c108c71831cfe8d244c83b0ee4bf5c8a COMPLETED

3. At top of this repo, nix-build -A plutus-playground.server
   COMPLETED

4 Enter nix-shell then: This ran literally all day and finished at the $prompt COMPLETED

after nix-shell build stopped entered these two cmnds:

[nix-shell:~/plutus-apps]$ cd plutus-playground-client
[nix-shell:~/plutus-apps/plutus-playground-client]$ npm run start

COMPLETED

I then navigated to localhost in browser which loaded the demo code to be compiled. I hit the compile button , it displayed a Compilation Failed message and display the following errors in the Linux Command window: FAILED

Answer 1

Notwithstanding the value/importance of cache issue pointed out by @angerman, the cause of the main question of your OP (i.e., the error on port 8080) appears to be that you started the client on 8009, but didn't show any steps for starting the server.

Open a second terminal session, enter the nix-shell, and start the server, and you should be set.

Answer 2

You should find the necessary etc/ folder from your root directory. In a terminal, you can do the following from anywhere to get there.

:~/plutus-apps$ cd /

bring you to this prompt...

:/$

that is your root dir/path (/) prompt

now;

:/$ ls

...and you should see something like this...

bin dev home lib32 libx32 media nix proc run snap sys usr

boot etc lib lib64 lost+found mnt opt root sbin srv tmp var

Note the etc/ dir. Now that you know where it is, from here just change to the etc/ directory. If you need to make a nix folder, simply use the mkdir command.

I am not sure how comfortable you are in the bash shell. If you are, here is a handy concatenated line to mkdir and create a nix.conf file at the same time:

sudo mkdir folder && sudo touch $_/file.txt

or -> sudo mkdir etc/nix/ && sudo touch $_/nix.conf

I hope that helps you out with this. Good luck!