Hands-on- Decentralized Identity(SSI)-Setting up Hyperledger Indy Node and Hyperledger-Aries Agent

Hyperledger Indy — Distributed Decentralized Identity Ledger

Hyperledger Aries — Interoperable connectors that helps connect to Decentralized Identity ledger.

Prerequisites :

1. Python >3.7

2. Docker

Setting up Indy network in Local Environment :

I did not face any challenges with setting up Indy network and it does comes up with decent documentation. I did try out the docker version of setup and here are steps below,

1. Clone Indy-sdk — https://github.com/hyperledger/indy-sdk
2. Build & Run the Image of Indy Pool, This lets you to run 4 validator nodes by default and genesis block which includes corresponding connections details for Aries Agent to connect.

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

3. Ensure you get latest version of Libindy

Above steps would create a docker container running the local Indy pool with ports exposed from 9701–9708.

Setting up Aries Agent in Local Environment :

Now that we have the Local Indy network setup , the next step would be running the Aries Agent.

What is Aries Agent ?

Aries agent communicate to Indy ledger and play a vital role in providing Verifiable Credentials(VC). I would not be covering upon SSI Concepts / VC , rather focus on setup.

We would using Faber-Alice demo code provided Aries-cloud-agent -https://github.com/hyperledger/aries-cloudagent-python/tree/master/demo

I did face some challenges when setting up the Faber and Alice agents in local network ,most of them with respect to Indy-plenum and Python rocks-db. Please note Agents by default connects to 9000 port , you need a server that communicates to Indy Pool to fetch genesis and registering DID. To avoid above challenges and peer-out from environmental issues, I have created Docker image that has all of required libraries for Aries-Agent to run.

FROM ubuntu:18.04
ARG uid=1000
# Install environment
RUN apt-get update -y && apt-get install -y \
        git \
        wget \
        python3.5 \
        python3-pip \
        python-setuptools \
        python3-nacl \
        apt-transport-https \
        ca-certificates \
        supervisor

RUN pip3 install -U \
        pip==20.2 \
        setuptools

RUN apt install software-properties-common -y
RUN add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
RUN apt update
RUN apt install python3.7 -y

RUN apt-get install libssl-dev swig -y
RUN apt-get install -y graphviz-dev -y
RUN apt-get install python3 python2.7-dev python3.6-dev \
     python3.7-dev \
     build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev \
     libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev zlib1g-dev \
     python-pip -y
RUN apt-get install python-dev  \
     build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev \
     libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev zlib1g-dev \
     python-pip
RUN apt install libeccodes-dev -y
RUN pip install setuptools --upgrade
RUN pip3 install setuptools --upgrade
RUN apt-get install libpq-dev python-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev libffi-dev -y

RUN pip3 install -U \
         Cython
RUN apt-get install libgflags-dev libsnappy-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libzstd-dev -y

RUN apt-get install librocksdb-dev -y
#RUN apt-get install -y libliz4-dev
RUN apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 68DB5E88
RUN add-apt-repository "deb https://repo.sovrin.org/sdk/deb xenial stable"
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y libindy=1.14.2

RUN alias python='/usr/bin/python3.7'
RUN . ~/.bashrc
RUN  apt-get install liblz4-dev
RUN python --version
#VOLUME /home/ubuntu/von-network : /von-network
#RUN mkdir von-network

RUN pip3 install -U \
         setuptools \
         pyyaml \
         aiodns \
         aiohttp \
         aiohttp-jinja2 \
         aiosqlite \
         base58 \
         cchardet \
         rlp \
         supervisor \
         indy-plenum \
         python3-indy

RUN useradd -ms /bin/bash -u $uid indy
RUN exec "$@"
EXPOSE 9000
#RUN cd /von-network

You can grab the docker file at https://github.com/rangesh-/indy-server/blob/master/local-indy-server.dockerfile

To build docker image :

sudo docker build -t indyserver -f local-indy-server.dockerfile .

With all prerequisites available in docker image, it would be easy for us to spin up container and run the aries-agent. To run aries-agent(Faber and Alice), Please follow steps provided in demo section of aries cloud agent- https://github.com/hyperledger/aries-cloudagent-python/tree/master/demo

We could also make use of ledger browser provided by Von-network to track transactions happening in Indy network.

Indy Ledger Browser :

Indy ledger browser that connects to local Indy pool shows the health of validator nodes and transactions.

References :

https://github.com/hyperledger/aries-cloudagent-python

https://github.com/hyperledger/aries-framework-go/blob/master/docs/rest/openapi_demo.md