OONI Probe Desktop

OONI Probe is a free and open source software designed to measure internet censorship and other forms of network interference.

Click here to report a bug

Other supported platforms: iOS, Desktop, CLI

This is the desktop implementation of OONI Probe.

Our two primary target platforms are:

• macOS
• Windows > 7 (we may also support older versions, but not as primary targets)

Moreover, since it's written in electron, we plan on also supporting Linux desktop users.

For some background on the decision to use electron and the libraries we chose to use, see: Writing a modern cross-platform desktop app.

Setup

In order to start hacking on this, we assume you have node and yarn installed.

Then you can run:

yarn install

You will also need to have copied a compiled binary of probe-cli and tor into the directory for the platform you plan to do development on.

To verify the downloaded tor binaries you should import the PGP key of the tor developers as follows (it can be verified from: https://support.torproject.org/tbb/how-to-verify-signature/):

gpg --recv-keys EF6E286DDA85EA2A4BA7DE684E2C6E8793298290

You can then download the assets by running:

yarn run download:probe-cli
yarn run download:tor

Run app in development mode

To build and run a development mode electron instance run:

yarn run start

Update the translations

• Save the strings from the canonical spreadsheet into data/lang-en.csv
• Run node scripts/update-translations.js
• Commit data/lang-en.csv, lang/*.json and renderer/static/translations.js into git

Build and sign macOS app

Obtain the development certificate and private key for our team (YWCG8FZTLT) from another OONI developer who has access to it. They need to ensure they export not only the certificate but also the related private key. You should receive a password encrypted .p12 file containing both. Just double click on this file and provide the password to import the certificate and the key into your keyring. At time point, dispose of the the .p12 file using rm -P.

Create a .env file in the root directory with the following content:

GH_TOKEN=TOKEN
OONI_APPLEID=your@apple.id
OONI_APPLEIDPASS=XXXX
OONI_TEAMID=YWCG8FZTLT

where TOKEN is a personal github token with repository scope, your@apple.id is the Apple ID you are using as part of our team, XXXX is a password specific application created by visiting appleid.apple.com and logging in as your@apple.id, and YWCG8FZTLT is the team ID used by OONI.

Then, run:

yarn install
yarn pack:mac

This will build ./dist/OONI Probe-$VERSION.dmg.

Build and sign an app on Windows

You will need a copy of the code signing key for windows that ends with .p12.

To generate a signed build you will have to set the environment variables:

WIN_CSC_LINK=/path/to/key.p12
WIN_CSC_KEY_PASSWORD=KEY_PASSWORD

You will then be able to run:

yarn install
yarn run pack:win

Publish a release

Run:

yarn install
yarn run publish:mac
yarn run publish:win

Important caveat be sure to not push the tag for the upcoming release until after the yarn run publish command has run successfully. If you do so users of the OONI Probe Desktop app will get an error when they start the app because the auto-update system will try to fetch the metadata associated with that tag.