How to Build a Kiosk using Free Tools

Setting up a secure public machine for demonstration purposes can be tricky. This is information freely available; however, when I first began this task, it was very difficult to get a straight answer on the do’s and don’ts.

Please Note: This is only an effective way if you want to utilize a web-based presentation or application.

Around a year ago, a client of ours sent two brand spankin’ new 24” iMac’s and wanted to use them as secure browsers. So, we got to work on figuring out how to implement this sort of thing on the Mac platform. Our company before used to build .NET applications specific to an event and windows based machine; this process wasn’t the most streamlined, seeing as how a simple web app for data capture would work just as well. So after some searching, I found a method that would work out perfectly for this and it’s even cross platform compatible!

Step 1:
Download Opera’s latest and greatest. (opens in a new window)

Step 2:
Open up Opera and get into the settings preferences.

Under the General Tab set your Starting Preference (Start with home page). Then set the home page appropriate to your event; I chose a local file to accomplish this.

Then click the Wand Tab and uncheck the “Let the Wand remember passwords” box.

Now head over to the Advanced Tab and find Security (highlighted) and click Set Master Password …
This will ensure that you can get the computer out of Kiosk mode in order to utilize it later on as a computer again. So this step is fairly important!

Under the same Advanced Tab you need to locate Shortcuts and uncheck the Enable mouse gestures. This will prevent anyone who may know Opera mouse gestures from being able to try any funny business.

Step 3:
Now that those settings are out of the way, we can move into the more nitty gritty stuff. As we are using Mac as an example, go ahead and fire up Script Editor.app from your Applications/Applescript folder. This will be a very basic script, one line of code.

do shell script "/Applications/Opera.app/Contents/MacOS/Opera -kioskmode -noexit"

Of course if you stuck Opera.app into another folder, the part in between the ” may slightly differ.

Save that script somewhere in case you want to edit it sometime, then do a Save As … You will select Application as the File Format. I usually save something like that onto the Desktop so an Event Staffer can locate it easily.

So is that it? Not quite, but we’re close. For it to actually be secure, you still need to filter out sites, or in a better case, only allow certain ones blocking all others.

Step 4:
Since Opera has been run, there will now be an urlfilter.ini file that should be edited. On the Mac you can find this at: /Users/yourusername/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences/ if the urlfilter.ini file is NOT in there, you need to create it (sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, no rhyme or reason to it). Okay, so you have the file, let’s open it up in a text editor and fill it with something similar to below.

Opera Preferences version 2.1
; Do not edit this file while Opera is running
; This file is stored in UTF-8 encoding

[prefs]
prioritize excludelist=0

[include]
file://localhost/Users/user/Sites/kiosk*
*.somewhereelse.com*
*.thatsite.net*

[exclude]
*

The *.domain.com* are sites that you will allow the browser to visit and the * are there as wildcards, in case one of those sites sends the user to a different subdomain or folder.

Step 5:
You just have to set up the computer at that point to automatically log in as the Kiosk User (or whatever user you just set this up for) and ensure that they have the Applescript Application in their Login Items path.

There are a lot more rules that can be applied; however, these should take care of most needs for most circumstances. If you are doing something for the military or another government branch, you may want to write an actual application.