Note: This repository is not maintained anymore. Be aware that the packages are outdated and may have security issues. The front-end application code was refactored and a new version is available as the Winden repository.

Transfer (depreciated)

Transfer is a graphical interface, built with the ionic/vue UI framework, for doing file transfer via the Magic Wormhole protocol. Transfer is cross-platform, primarily targeting web, but can be built for iOS and Android using capacitor. It is also easily ported to desktop via electron.

Status

This web app is in 'alpha' state, and not ready for production use.

Development Setup

Follow these steps to get the whole setup running on a local computer for easy development and debugging.

Cloning

git clone git@github.com:LeastAuthority/Transfer.git
cd Transfer
git submodule init
git submodule update --recursive

or you can do it in one step:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:LeastAuthority/Transfer.git

Building / Running (Web)

System Dependencies

• docker
• docker-compose

(See docker documentation for installation instructions)

Install yarn globally:

npm install -g yarn

App dependencies

Install using yarn:

yarn install

The code uses wormhole-william built as a Web Assembly (wasm) module. If you want to rebuild the wasm code do:

yarn build:wasm

To run local mailbox and relay servers (using docker-compose):

yarn compose:up -d

Serve the web worker entrypoint:

yarn serve:worker

Serve the app:

yarn run serve

After this, open a browser and point it to https://localhost:8080.

Building the site

To build the website for a particular stage (playground vs production), we should create a file in the root of the filesystem called .production.build.env or .playground.build.env (according to the stage for which we are building) and define three variables there:

VUE_APP_STAGE_HOSTNAME="https://foo.bar.org"
VUE_APP_STAGE_MAILBOX_URL="wss://mailbox.foo.bar.org/v1"
VUE_APP_STAGE_RELAY_URL="wss://relay.foo.bar.org:433"

Now, the site files can be generated with:

yarn build:playground

or

yarn build:production

A directory called dist would be created and it can be run with:

npx serve ./dist

to test whether the URLs are correct or whether the functionality or a fix that was added is working fine.

Deployments / Cache Invalidation

Deployments can be done via yarn deploy:<stage name>. This will sync the ./dist (build output) directory with the stage's S3 bucket. Executing this script via yarn will also cause the "uncache" script to run which invalidates specific objects in the stage's cloudfront cache. This invalidation can also be performed directly with yarn uncache:<stage name>.

Dotenv

Deployment and cache invalidation scripts rely on environment variables specified below. When invoking these scripts, either directly or via yarn, environment variables may be provided as such, i.e.:

AWS_PROFILE=my-profile node ./scripts/deploy.js
# OR
AWS_PROFILE=my-profile yarn deploy:staging

Alternatively, a dotenv file will be loaded, if present, and used to populate environment variables accordingly. The deploy and cache invalidation scripts apply a stage-specific dotenv file following the convention .<stage name>.env, e.g.: .staging.env.

Name	Description
AWS_PROFILE	AWS credentials profile to use when authenticating with AWS. See named profiles.
S3_BUCKET	AWS S3 bucket associated with this stage to upload build output directory to. For public buckets, this will likely be the fully-qualified domain name for this stage.
CDF_DISTRIBUTION	AWS Cloudfront distribution ID associated with this stage for which the cache should be invalidated. The cloudfront distribution ID can be obtained given the FQDN. The AWS CLI can be used to do list distributions: AWS_PROFILE=<profile name> aws cloudfront list-distributions. Searching the results for the FQDN of the stage in question will yield a distribution ID. Alternatively, the cloudfront web UI can be used similarly.