FoxBox

Technologies

Rust

We're using Rust for the daemon/server.

Currently a fairly recent nightly is required. To determine which version of rust is being used, check the .travis.yml file.

Look for these lines near the top of the file:

rust:
  - nightly-YYYY-MM-DD

It's recommended that you use rustup to install and switch between versions of Rust and available toolchains. You should then be able to then use:

cd /your/path/to/foxbox     # Required, otherwise you might replace rustc for another project
rustup override set nightly-YYYY-MM-DD   # Replace with the correct date you found

After that, you should be all set in regard to compiling the project.

⚠️ Warning

Sometimes, there might be a 1-day-difference between the date shown in .travis.yml and the one reported by rustc. For example nightly-2016-04-06 corresponds to:

$ rustc -V
rustc 1.9.0-nightly (241a9d0dd 2016-04-05)

Build requirements

Dependency	Debian/Raspian	Fedora	Arch	OS X (Homebrew)
libupnp	libupnp-dev	libupnp-devel	extra/libupnp	libupnp
libssl	libssl-dev	openssl-devel	via base-devel	openssl
libev	libev-dev	libev-devel	?	libev
libavahi	libavahi-client-dev	avahi-devel	extra/avahi	n.a.
libsqlite3	libsqlite3-dev	sqlite-devel	core/sqlite	sqlite
libespeak	libespeak-dev	espeak-devel	community/espeak	espeak
libdbus	?	dbus-devel	core/libdbus	d-bus
libudev	libudev-dev	?	n.a.	n.a.
pkg-config	pkg-config	?	pkg-config	pkg-config

Node

We're using Node to run Selenium tests. Currently v4.x LTS. We plan to stay on stable LTS releases. It's recommended that you use nvm to install and switch between versions of Node.

Target hardware

We're using the Raspberry Pi 2 as a prototyping target (ARMv7). The target operating system is the latest Raspbian which is based on Debian 8.0 Jessie.

Contributing

Note: We're in an iterative prototyping phase of the project. Things are moving really fast so it may be easier to contribute when the dust starts to settle. You've been warned.

Forks and feature branches

You should fork the main repo and create pull requests against feature branches of your fork. If you need some guidance with this see:

• https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/
• http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html

Setup

$ git clone git@github.com:<username>/foxbox.git
$ cd foxbox

Extra steps for Mac OS X

Foxbox requires some up-to-date libraries (like OpenSSL). In order to make sure you have the correct packages and bindings, we recommend you install brew and run:

brew install openssl libupnp sqlite libev
export LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

Build time options

Disable authentication

You may want to disable endpoints authentication to ease your development process. You can do that by removing authentication from the default feature in the Cargo.toml file.

[features]
default = []
authentication = []

Runtime dependencies

Foxbox expects certain executables to be available in the PATH during its execution. Some are third party, others are built as components found in the components directory.

Dependency	Optional?	Where to find it
dnschallenge	No (required for LetsEncrypt DNS-01 challenge)	Built as a binary with cargo build in the same target directory as foxbox, see target/<profile> directory
bash	No (required for LetsEncrypt client)	System package manager

Running the daemon

$ ./run.sh

There are several command line options to start the daemon:

-v, --verbose : Toggle verbose output.
-l, --local-name <hostname> : Set local hostname. Linux only. Requires to be a member of the netdev group.
-p, --port <port>  : Set port to listen on for http connections. [default: 3000]
-w, --wsport <wsport> : Set port to listen on for websocket. [default: 4000]
-d, --profile <path> : Set profile path to store user data.
-r, --register <url> : URL of registration endpoint [default: https://localhost:4443]
-t, --tunnel <tunnel> : Set the tunnel endpoint hostname. If omitted, the tunnel is disabled.
-s, --tunnel-secret <secret> : Set the tunnel shared secret. [default: secret]
-c, --config <namespace;key;value> :  Set configuration override
-h, --help : Print this help menu.
--disable-tls : Run as a plain HTTP server, disabling encryption.
--dns-domain <domain> : Set the top level domain for public DNS. If omitted, the tunnel is disabled
--dns-api <url> : Set the DNS API endpoint

Currently you would likely want to start the daemon like this:

./run.sh -- -r https://knilxof.org:4443 --disable-tls

That means that your foxbox will be using our dev registration server and you will be disabling TLS support. We hope to have out-of-the-box TLS support ready pretty soon, but for now disabling it is the easiest way to run foxbox.

If you want to use TLS you'll likely want to add target/<profile> (eg: target/debug) to your PATH so that dnschallenge is found properly.

Enable tunneling support

If you want to access your foxbox from outside of the network where it is running, you'll need to enable tunneling support. To do that you need to specify the address of the tunneling server that you want to use and the shared secret for this server (if any) to access to your foxbox from outside of your foxbox' local network.

./run.sh -- -r https://knilxof.org:4443 -t knilxof.org:443 -s secret --disable-tls

In the example above, knilxof.org:443 is the location of our tunneling dev server, which has a not-that-secret-anymore value that you'll need to ask for on IRC. You are supposed to substitute <yourname> by the subdomain of your choice, but take into account that you'll need to keep the domain name of the tunneling server, in this case .knilxof.org. Starting the daemon with the command line options above you should be able to access your foxbox through http://yourname.knilxof.org.

Custom local hostname

To run with custom local host name (eg. foxbox.local):

$ ./run.sh -- -l foxbox

NOTE: currently changing of host name is done via avahi-daemon and therefore supported only on Linux platform. To be able to change local host machine name user must be either included into netdev group or allow any other suitable user group to manage host name by adding the following policy to /etc/dbus-1/system.d/avahi-dbus.conf:

<policy group="any_suitable_group_name">
  <allow send_destination="org.freedesktop.Avahi"/>
  <allow receive_sender="org.freedesktop.Avahi"/>
</policy>

Custom Philips Hue nUPNP server

$ ./run.sh -- -c "philips_hue;nupnp_url;http://localhost:8002/"

Interacting with the daemon

Once you have your foxbox up and running you can try our demo application by browsing to https://fxbox.github.io/app.

Alternatively, you can use the foxbox' current REST API

Rust tests

$ cargo test

Selenium tests

You'll need to make sure you install the dependencies via:

$ npm install

Then you can run the Selenium tests via:

$ ./run.sh -- --disable-tls
$ npm run test-selenium

Cross compiling to ARM

There is no one solution for this. The process will be different depending on your operating system. You may be able to build on a RPi, but the larger the application gets, the slower and more painful this will be (not recommended).

Linux

There is support to cross-compile with a Docker image targetting the Raspberry Pi (model 2 and up) in the tools/docker directory.

For an extensive write-up about cross compiling Rust programs see:

• https://github.com/japaric/rust-cross

Mac OS X

Cross compiling on Mac hasn't been documented. A PR is welcomed. 😉