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Hacking

This document explains how to build the Wasm module of the Internet Identity canister from scratch.

💡 Binary releases are available on the release page.

💡 The simplest way to build the code is to use the Docker build.

💡 Make sure to read up on the build features and flavors.

The build requires the following dependencies:

NOTE! If you're only going to hack on the HTML and CSS code, see the showcase section.

Running Locally

To run the Internet Identity canister, proceed as follows after cloning the repository

npm ci
dfx start [--clean] [--background]

In a different terminal, run the following command to install the Internet Identity canister:

dfx deploy internet_identity --no-wallet

Note

By default, the CAPTCHA is disabled used. If you want to use the real (random) CAPTCHA, set II_DUMMY_CAPTCHA to 0 and configure II to use a CAPTCHA:

II_DUMMY_CAPTCHA=0 dfx deploy internet_identity --no-wallet \
    --argument '(opt record { captcha_config = opt record { max_unsolved_captchas= 50:nat64; captcha_trigger = variant {Static = variant {CaptchaEnabled}}}})'

Then the canister can be used as

$ dfx canister call internet_identity stats
(
  record { ... }
)

See dfx canister call --help and the documentation for more information.

The dfx executable can proxy queries to the canister. To view it, run the following and open the resulting link in your browser:

echo "http://$(dfx canister id internet_identity).localhost:4943"

Note: The URL doesn't work for safari.

Building the frontend

The fastest workflow to get the development environment running is to deploy once with

npm ci
dfx start [--clean] [--background]
dfx deploy internet_identity --no-wallet

To serve the frontend locally (recommended during development), run the following:

npm run dev

Then open http://localhost:5173 in your browser. The page is reloaded whenever you save changes to files.

NOTE on testing on LAN:

If you are testing on LAN -- for instance, connecting to an Internet Identity server running on your laptop from your smartphone over WiFi -- you may run into the following issues:

  • The webpage may not be accessible on LAN. By default the development server will serve the content using the localhost host. Firewall rules for localhost are somewhat strict; if you cannot access the page from devices on your LAN try serving with npm run host.
  • Internet Identity may tell you that your browser is not supported. The reason for this is that some security-focused features are only enabled on https and localhost pages. A workaround is to use ngrok to forward your local port over https.

Test suites

We have a set of Selenium tests that run through the various flows. To set up a local deployment follow these steps:

  1. Start a local replica with dfx start
  2. Deploy II and the other test canisters with dfx deploy --no-wallet
  3. Start the vite dev server with TLS enabled: TLS_DEV_SERVER=1 npm run dev

To watch the tests run in the browser remove the headless option from src/frontend/src/test-e2e/util.ts.

The tests can be executed by running:

npm run test:e2e

Note

By default, the e2e tests expect the CAPTCHA to be disabled. If you want to run the e2e tests against II with (dummy) CAPTCHA enabled, make sure that the II_DUMMY_CAPTCHA=1 was set when building II and then run:

II_CAPTCHA=enabled npm run test:e2e

We autoformat our code using prettier. Running npm run format formats all files in the frontend. If you open a PR that isn't formatted according to prettier, CI will automatically add a formatting commit to your PR.

We use eslint to check the frontend code. You can run it with npm run lint.

Please note that you will need to have bash 5 or later installed to run the e2e tests. You can check your bash version by running bash --version.

Canisters tests

There are plenty of unit and integration tests that cover the different canisters of this repository which cover all the functionality that Internet Identity offer.

To run the canister tests, run the following command from the root directory:

./scripts.test-canisters.sh

Building the backend

The Internet Identity backend is a Wasm canister implemented in Rust and built from the internet_identity cargo package (src/internet_identity).

Run the following command in the root of the repository to execute the test suites of all the libraries:

cargo test

The backend canister is also used to serve the frontend assets. This creates a dependency between the frontend and the backend. So running the usual cargo build --target wasm32-unknown-unknown -p internet_identity might not work or include an outdated version of the frontend.

Use the following command to build the backend canister Wasm file instead:

dfx build internet_identity

This will produce ./internet_identity.wasm.gz.

Attribute Sharing / Verifiable Credentials

To experiment with Attribute Sharing / Verifiable Credentials feature, one can start a demo VC-issuer by running

dfx deploy issuer

This will deploy also internet_identity, and provision the issuer for the testing environment. See VC issuer documentation for details.

Our test-app offers a simple relying party functionality and can be deployed using

dfx deploy test_app

Afterward one can serve the frontends locally via:

npm run dev

and access the issuer FE at http://issuer.localhost:5173/, and the test-app at http://test_app.localhost:5173/ (the relying party is functionality is at the bottom of the page).

Showcase

The simplest way to make visual changes (HTML & CSS, and non-flow JS) is to start the showcase:

npm run showcase

This will start a webserver showcasing most II pages & components. The showcase can also be built:

npm run build:showcase [--base 'some-base/']
npm run preview:showcase [--base 'some-base/']