interopalliance/life-server repository overview

⁠Life Server (life-server)

⁠Table of Contents

• Background⁠
  • Audience⁠
  • Roadmap⁠
  • Differences from Solid Server⁠
• Install⁠
• Usage⁠
• Security⁠
• Contribute⁠
• License⁠

Important: For upgrade notes and change history, see CHANGELOG.md⁠.

⁠Background

Life Server is personal data server written in Node.js, originally based on MIT's Solid Server⁠.

⁠Audience

This server is intended for the following audiences:

1. (primarily) Myself. I'm using this as an experimental platform for incubating and implementing various Solid-related⁠ and Solid-adjacent specifications and standards.
2. (hopefully) Other developers of user centric offline-first decentralized applications.
3. (to a much smaller extent) End-users interested in running their own file sharing server (a minimal Dropbox/Google Drive sort of setup). This server is not really ready for mainstream (or even early adopter) usage.
4. (almost not at all) For system administrators / potential service providers interested in running their own multi-user data server.

To put it another way, due to a shortage of engineering resources, the priorities will be: Developer QoL (Quality of Life) over User QoL over DevOps QoL.

⁠Roadmap

Updated: June 2020.

This is an experimental server focusing on interop exploration and rapid feature iteration. "Move fast and break things (and then fix them just as quickly)", to use a tired cliché.

⁠Roadmap Phase One

This phase focuses on general cleanup and refactoring from the source node-solid-server v4 baseline.

• Remove external dependency on Mashlib and the Data Browser. (The various built-in apps (account homepage, data viewing and file management, sharing and permission management, etc) will be performed on the server side.)
• Simplify architecture, remove a number of non-core components (globbing, realtime updates via WebSockets, WebID-TLS local authentication, CORS proxy and authentication proxy, storage quotas, external WebIDs).
• Refactor the LDP interface to more closely match the proposed Solid architecture⁠, and to support modular/pluggable storage backends beyond the existing File System based one (such as an in-memory store, graph stores and others).
• Bring some external authn-related dependencies (such as the oidc-auth-manager⁠ and the solid-multi-rp-client⁠) libs into this repository (to make for a faster release and refactoring process).
• Replace logging layer (currently a mix of console and debug) with a dedicated logger like Bunyan or Pino.
• Shorten the WebID Profile URL template for new accounts from /profile/card#me to /web#id
• Simplify the new account templating system (do not create template and view copies for customizability)

Bonus/If-time:

• Update node-mailer package to latest version
• Update inquirer and commander packages to latest version
• Make all tests pass on Windows 10

⁠Roadmap Phase Two

This phase focuses on exploring some advanced features that may make it into Solid spec proposals, as well as integration with external Solid-adjacent projects and specs.

• Fix/update Dockerfile (to enable Life Server to be hosted on PermanentCloud⁠)
• DID Integration
  • Generate a did:web⁠ DID and corresponding keys for the Server itself, during installation.
  • Generate a did:web⁠ DID and corresponding keys for each user on account registration.
  • (in progress) Implement DIDAuth for wallet, hook it up to Login page.
  • Add did:key⁠ support
  • Add Veres One⁠ DIDs support
• Interop with Verifiable Credentials
  • Implement Credential Handler API Wallet⁠ registration when user creates an account.
• Implement an in-Memory based LDP backend, to go alongside the FS backend.
• Integrate or implement Static OIDC Client Registration functionality, to make interfacing with server-side Solid apps easier.
• Investigate level of effort required to switch from the current oidc-op OpenID Connect Provider library to a more widely supported one, such as Filip's node-oidc-provider⁠ lib.
• Implement a server-side metadata mechanism, to support being able to record who created a resource⁠
• (in progress) Experimental integration with CouchDB⁠ (for synchronizing of graphs and documents to mobile and offline-first clients).
• Explore using an Encrypted Data Vault⁠ as a storage backend. This would require some basic Key Management capability, possible based on the Web KMS spec⁠.
• Interop with the Fediverse by implementing ActivityPub⁠ protocol.

⁠Differences from Solid Server

Since node-solid-server⁠ (NSS) is being deprecated in favor of inrupt/pod-server⁠, this repo intends to be another compatible implementation (the more the merrier!).

Does not support:

• Using an external WebID on signup
• acl:origin checking or Trusted Apps (uses solid-permissions⁠
  instead of acl-check.js⁠ for access control)
• Password strength checking on account signup.
• Enforcement of storage space quotas
• WebID-TLS local authentication
• WebSockets
• Globbing

⁠Value Proposition for Developers

See Solid and Life Server Value Proposition for Developers⁠ doc.

⁠Install

⁠Pre-requisites: Node.js v12+

• Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows 10
• Node 12+

To run the Life Server server, you will first need to install Node.js. (The developers recommend using nvm⁠ to install Node.)

⁠Install life-server from Github

git clone https://github.com/interop-alliance/life-server.git
cd life-server
npm install

⁠Edit /etc/hosts (development/testing only)

To run the account creation on unit tests, life-server's test suite uses the following localhost domains: nic.localhost, tim.localhost, and nicola.localhost. You will need to create host file entries for these, in order for the tests to pass.

Edit your /etc/hosts file, and append:

# Used for unit testing
127.0.0.1 nic.localhost
127.0.0.1 tim.localhost
127.0.0.1 nicola.localhost

⁠(Optional) Prepare the SSL/TLS certificate

Local/Development: life-server includes a default localhost self-signed TLS certificate in the config/ folder. Advanced users may want to create their own certificates for local testing.

Production: Installing life-server in a production environment will require a valid TLS certificate (self-signed certs will not work). In addition, if you're running the server in Multi User mode, you will need a Wildcard Certificate⁠.

⁠(Optional) Generate a config file

The easiest way to customize life-server is by running the init wizard. This will create a config.dev.js in your current folder:

./bin/server init

⁠Usage

To run your server:

./bin/server start

After startup, the server is available at the configured server URL (by default, https://localhost:7070).

⁠Usage with Docker

You can run life-server from our prebuilt docker image⁠ with the following command:

Run latest build from master branch

docker run -p 7070:7070 interopalliance/life-server:master

Run a tagged release

docker run -p 7070:7070 interopalliance/life-server:{gitTag}
# e.g. docker run -p 7070:7070 interopalliance/life-server:v6.0.2

You can then access the application at https://localhost:7070⁠.

If you want to provide a custom config.js, mount it as a volume:

docker run -p 7070:7070 -v $(pwd)/config.json:/usr/src/app/config.dev.js

⁠Build your own Docker image

Clone the repository, then:

docker build -t life-server .
docker run -p 7070:7070 life-server

⁠Security

TBD

Note: This is an experimental research server, not for production use.

⁠Contribute

Life Server is only possible because of a large community of Solid contributors⁠. A heartfelt thank you to everyone for all of your efforts!

⁠License

The MIT License⁠