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Installation | Documentation | Discussions | Releases

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What is Minder?

Minder by Stacklok is an open source platform that helps development teams and open source communities build more secure software, and prove to others that what they’ve built is secure. Minder helps project owners proactively manage their security posture by providing a set of checks and policies to minimize risk along the software supply chain, and attest their security practices to downstream consumers.

Minder allows users to enroll repositories and define policy to ensure repositories and artifacts are configured consistently and securely. Policies can be set to alert only or auto-remediate. Minder provides a predefined set of rules and can also be configured to apply custom rules.

Minder can be deployed as a Helm chart and provides a CLI tool ‘minder’. Stacklok, the company behind Minder, also provides a free-to-use hosted version of Minder (for public repositories only). Minder is designed to be extensible, allowing users to integrate with their existing tooling and processes.

Features

• Repo configuration and security: Simplify configuration and management of security settings and policies across repos.
• Proactive security enforcement: Continuously enforce best practice security configurations by setting granular policies to alert only or auto-remediate.
• Artifact attestation: Continuously verify that packages are signed to ensure they’re tamper-proof, using the open source project Sigstore.
• Dependency management: Manage dependency security posture by helping developers make better choices and enforcing controls. Minder is integrated with Trusty by Stacklok to enable policy-driven dependency management based on the risk level of dependencies.

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Stacklok Instance

Your friends at Stacklok have set up a public instance of Minder that you can use for free. The Minder CLI tool (minder) from our official releases is configured to use this instance by default. You can also use the public instance by running minder auth login and following the prompts.

minder auth login --grpc-host api.stacklok.com --identity-url https://auth.stacklok.com

Note that it's not possible to register private repositories. If you'd like to use Minder with private repositories, feel free to contact us! We'd be thrilled to help you out.

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Getting Started

Installation

You can install minder using one of the following methods:

MacOS (Homebrew)

brew install stacklok/tap/minder

Windows (Winget)

winget install stacklok.minder

Releases

Download the latest release from - minder/releases.

Build it from source

Build minder and minder-server from source by following - #build-from-source.

Run minder

To use minder with the public instance of Minder (api.stacklok.com), run:

minder auth login

Upon completion, you should see that the Minder Server is set to api.stacklok.com.

Enroll a repository provider

Minder supports GitHub as a provider to enroll repositories. To enroll your provider, run:

minder provider enroll --provider github

A browser session will open, and you will be prompted to login to your GitHub. Once you have granted Minder access, you will be redirected back, and the user will be enrolled. The minder CLI application will report the session is complete.

Register a repository

Now that you've granted the GitHub app permissions to access your repositories, you can register them:

minder repo register --provider github

Once you've registered the repositories, the Minder server will listen for events from GitHub and will automatically create the necessary webhooks for you.

Now you can run minder commands against the public instance of Minder where you can manage your registered repositories and create custom profiles that would help ensure your repositories are configured consistently and securely.

For more information about minder, see:

• minder CLI commands - Docs.
• Minder documentation - Docs.

Development

Build from source

Prerequisites

You'd need the following tools available - Go, Docker and Docker Compose.

Clone the repository

git clone git@github.com:stacklok/minder.git

Build

Run the following to build minder and minder-server(binaries will be present at ./bin/)

make build

To use minder with the public instance of Minder (api.stacklok.com), run:

minder auth login

Upon completion, you should see that the Minder Server is set to api.stacklok.com.

If you want to run minder against a local minder-server instance, proceed with the steps below.

Initial configuration

Create the initial configuration file for minder and minder-server. You may do so by doing.

cp config/config.yaml.example config.yaml

You'd also have to set up an OAuth2 application for minder-server to use. Once completed, update the configuration file with the appropriate values. See the documentation on how to do that - Docs.

Run minder-server

Start minder-server along with its dependant services (keycloak and postgres) by running:

KO_DOCKER_REPO=ko.local make run-docker

Configure social login (GitHub)

minder-server uses Keycloak as an IAM. To log in, you'll need to set up a GitHub OAuth2 application and configure Keycloak to use it.

Create an OAuth2 application for GitHub here. Select New OAuth App and fill in the details. The callback URL should be http://localhost:8081/realms/stacklok/broker/github/endpoint. Create a new client secret for your OAuth2 client.

Using the client_id and client_secret you created above, enable GitHub login on Keycloak by running the following command:

make KC_GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=<client_id> KC_GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=<client_secret> github-login

Run minder

Ensure the config.yaml file is present in the current directory so minder can use it.

Run minder against your local instance of Minder (localhost:8090):

minder auth login

Upon completion, you should see that the Minder Server is set to localhost:8090.

Development guidelines

You can find more detailed information about the development process in the Developer Guide.

Minder API

• REST API documentation - Link.

• Proto API documentation - Link.

• Protobuf - Link.

• OpenAPI/swagger spec (JSON) - Link.

Contributing

We welcome contributions to Minder. Please see our Contributing guide for more information.

Provenance

The Minder project follows the best practices for software supply chain security and transparency.

All released assets:

• Have a generated and verifiable SLSA Build Level 3 provenance. For more information, see the SLSA website.
• Have been signed and verified during release using the Sigstore project. This ensures that they are tamper-proof and can be verified by anyone.
• Have an SBOM archive generated and published along with the release. This allows users to understand the dependencies of the project and their security posture.

License

Minder is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.