Indy SDK

This is the official SDK for Hyperledger Indy, which provides a distributed-ledger-based foundation for self-sovereign identity. Indy provides a software ecosystem for private, secure, and powerful identity, and the Indy SDK enables clients for it. The major artifact of the SDK is a c-callable library; there are also convenience wrappers for various programming languages and Indy CLI tool.

All bugs, stories, and backlog for this project are managed through Hyperledger's Jira in project IS (note that regular Indy tickets are in the INDY project instead...). Also, make sure to join us on Hyperledger's Rocket.Chat at #indy-sdk to discuss. You will need a Linux Foundation login to get access to these channels

Understanding Hyperledger Indy

If you have just started learning about self-sovereign identity, here are some resources to increase your understanding:

This extended tutorial introduces Indy, explains how the whole ecosystem works, and how the functions in the SDK can be used to construct rich clients: Indy-SDK Getting-Started Guide
A recent webinar explaining self-sovereign identity using Hyperledger Indy and Sovrin: SSI Meetup Webinar
Visit the main resource for all things "Indy" to get acquainted with the code base, helpful resources, and up-to-date information: Hyperledger Wiki-Indy.
You may also want to look at the older guide that explored the ecosystem via command line. That material is being rewritten but still contains some useful ideas.

How-To Tutorials

Short, simple tutorials that demonstrate how to accomplish common tasks are also available. See the doc/how-tos folder.

Installing the SDK

Release channels

The Indy SDK release process defines the following release channels:

master - development builds for each push to master branch.
rc - release candidates.
stable - stable releases.

Please refer to our release workflow for more details.

Ubuntu based distributions (Ubuntu 16.04)

It is recommended to install the SDK packages with APT:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 68DB5E88
sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://repo.sovrin.org/sdk/deb xenial {release channel}"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y libindy

{release channel} must be replaced with master, rc or stable to define corresponded release channel. Please See the section "Release channels" above for more details.

Windows

Go to https://repo.sovrin.org/windows/libindy/{release-channel}.
Download last version of libindy.
Unzip archives to the directory where you want to save working library.
After unzip you will get next structure of files:

Your working directory
- include
  - ...
- lib
  - indy.dll
  - libeay32md.dll
  - libsodium.dll
  - libzmq.dll
  - ssleay32md.dll

include contains c-header files which contains all necessary declarations that may be need for your applications.

lib contains all necessary binaries which contains libindy and all it's dependencies. You must add to PATH environment variable path to lib. It's necessary for dynamic linkage your application with libindy.

{release channel} must be replaced with master, rc or stable to define corresponded release channel. See section "Release channels" for more details.

iOS

See wrapper iOS install documentation.

MacOS

Pre-built libraries are not provided for MacOS. Please look here for details on building from source for MacOS.

Note: After building libindy, add the path containing the library the LD_LIBRARY_PATH and DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables. This is necessary for dynamically linking your application with libindy. The dynamic linker will first check for the library in LD_LIBRARY_PATH if the library in your application doesn't include directory names. If the library in your application does include any directory name, then dynamic linker will search for the library in DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH (not LD_LIBRARY_PATH) so we recommend you set both variables to be safe.

RHEL-based distributions (Amazon Linux 2017.03)

Pre-built libraries are not provided for RHEL-based distributions. Please look here for details on building from source for RHEL-based distributions.

After successfully compiling libindy, you will need to add the path containing libindy.so to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. This is required for your application to link to libindy.

How to build Indy SDK from source

Note: By default cargo build produce debug artifacts with a large amount of run-time checks. It's good for development, but this build can be in 100+ times slower for some math calculation. If you would like to analyse CPU performance of libindy for your use case, you have to use release artifacts (cargo build --release).

How to start local nodes pool with docker

To test the SDK codebase with a virtual Indy node network, you can start a pool of local nodes using docker:

Start the pool of local nodes on 127.0.0.1:9701-9708 with Docker by running:

docker build -f ci/indy-pool.dockerfile -t indy_pool .
docker run -itd -p 9701-9708:9701-9708 indy_pool

Dockerfile ci/indy-pool.dockerfile supports an optional pool_ip param that allows changing ip of pool nodes in generated pool configuration. The following commands allow to start local nodes pool in custom docker network and access this pool by custom ip in docker network:

docker network create --subnet 10.0.0.0/8 indy_pool_network
docker build --build-arg pool_ip=10.0.0.2 -f ci/indy-pool.dockerfile -t indy_pool .
docker run -d --ip="10.0.0.2" --net=indy_pool_network indy_pool

Note that for Windows and MacOS this approach has some issues. Docker for these OS run in their virtual environment. First command creates network for container and host can't get access to that network because container placed on virtual machine. You must appropriate set up networking on your virtual environment. See the instructions for MacOS below.

Docker port mapping on MacOS

If you use some Docker distribution based on Virtual Box you can use Virtual Box's port forwarding future to map 9701-9709 container ports to local 9701-9709 ports.

If you use VMWare Fusion to run Docker locally, follow the instructions from this article and add the following lines to /Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/vmnet8/nat.conf:

# Use these with care - anyone can enter into your VM through these...
# The format and example are as follows:
#<external port number> = <VM's IP address>:<VM's port number>
#8080 = 172.16.3.128:80
9701 = <your_docker_ip>:9701
9702 = <your_docker_ip>:9702
9703 = <your_docker_ip>:9703
9704 = <your_docker_ip>:9704
9705 = <your_docker_ip>:9705
9706 = <your_docker_ip>:9706
9707 = <your_docker_ip>:9707
9708 = <your_docker_ip>:9708
9709 = <your_docker_ip>:9709

where <your_docker_ip> is your Docker host IP.

Docker machine needs to be rebooted after these changes.

Wrappers documentation

The following wrappers are tested and complete. There is also active work on a wrapper for Go; visit #indy-sdk on Rocket.Chat for details.

Indy CLI documentation

An explanation of how to install the official command line interface for that provides commands to manage wallets and interactions with the ledger: Indy CLI

How to migrate

The documents that provide necessary information for Libindy migration. This document is written for developers using Libindy 1.3.0 to provide necessary information and to simplify their transition to API of Libindy 1.4.0.

v1.3.0 → v1.4.0

bezirg / indy-sdk