haochenuw / signal-demo

An interactive demo of the signal protocol, developed based on libsignal-typescript-demo

Demo React Application using the libsignal-protocol-typescript

Deployment

To deploy this website to AWS EC2,

1. launch a EC2 instance. Allow http and https in the security group config.

2. SSH into the instance, install necessary packages and clone this repository

# Install nvm
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.0/install.sh | bash

# Activate nvm
export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"  # This loads nvm bash_completion

# Install Node.js version 16.20.0
nvm install 16.20.0

# Install Git and apache2
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git apache2 -y

# clone the signal demo app if needed
directory_path="./signal-demo"

if [ -d "$directory_path" ]; then
    echo "Directory $directory_path exists"
else
    echo "Directory $directory_path does not exist"
    git clone https://github.com/haochenuw/signal-demo.git
fi

3. Build and setup the dependencies. Note: if EC2 build fails. Can build locally.

cd signal-demo 
bash setup.sh 
npm run build 

4. Copy the build files into apache2 location

mv -r build /var/www/SignalBuild

If not built on EC2,

scp -r build user@ec2-ip:/var/www/SignalBuild 

5. Configure apache2

cd etc/apache2/sites-available
sudo mv 000-default.conf 001-signal.conf

Then, put the following into the file 001-signal.conf

<VirtualHost *:443>
        ServerName https://ec2-54-201-48-228.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com/

        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        DocumentRoot /var/www/SignalBuild


        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

        SSLEngine on
        SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/certs/apache.crt
        SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/certs/apache.key
</VirtualHost>

6. Setup SSL config (note: this is required for crypto functionalities to work)

sudo apt-get install openssl
sudo a2enmod ssl
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/certs

Then, go into /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and change the section to look like this:

<Directory /var/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride ALL
        Require all granted
</Directory>

Then, generate a self-signed cert

cd /etc/apache2/certs
sudo openssl req -new -newkey rsa:4096 -x509 -sha256 -days 365 -nodes -out apache.crt -keyout apache.key

7. start service

sudo systemctl restart apache2

To verify it works, go to the public IP of your EC2 instance.