boulder

Boulder - An ACME CA This is an implementation of an ACME-based CA. The ACME protocol allows the CA to automatically verify that an applicant for a certificate actually controls an identifier, and allows subscribers to issue and revoke certificates for the identifiers they control. Boulder is the software that runs Let's Encrypt. Contents Overview Setting up Boulder Development Working with Certbot Working with another ACME Client Production Contributing License Overview Boulder is divided into the following main components: Web Front Ends (one per API version) Registration Authority Validation Authority Certificate Authority Storage Authority Publisher CRL Updater This component model lets us separate the function of the CA by security context. The Web Front End, Validation Authority, CRL Storer, and Publisher need access to the Internet, which puts them at greater risk of compromise. The Registration Authority can live without Internet connectivity, but still needs to talk to the Web Front End and Validation Authority. The Certificate Authority need only receive instructions from the Registration Authority. All components talk to the SA for storage, so most lines indicating SA RPCs are not shown here. CA ---------> Publisher ^ | Subscriber -> WFE --> RA --> SA --> MariaDB | ^ Subscriber server <- VA <----+ | | Browser -----> S3 <----- CRL Storer/Updater Internally, the logic of the system is based around five types of objects: accounts, authorizations, challenges, orders and certificates, mapping directly to the resources of the same name in ACME. Requests from ACME clients result in new objects and changes to objects. The Storage Authority maintains persistent copies of the current set of objects. Boulder uses gRPC for inter-component communication. For components that you want to be remote, it is necessary to instantiate a "client" and "server" for that component. The client implements the component's Go interface, while the server has the actual logic for the component. A high level overview for this communication model can be found in the gRPC documentation. The full details of how the various ACME operations happen in Boulder are laid out in the Boulder implementation details. Setting up Boulder Development Boulder has a Dockerfile and uses Docker Compose to make it easy to install and set up all its dependencies. This is how the maintainers work on Boulder, and is our main recommended way to run it for development/experimentation. It is not suitable for use as a production environment. While we aim to make Boulder easy to setup ACME client developers may find Pebble, a miniature version of Boulder, to be better suited for continuous integration and quick experimentation. We recommend setting git's fsckObjects setting before getting a copy of Boulder to have better integrity guarantees for updates. Clone the boulder repository: git clone https://github.com/letsencrypt/boulder/ cd boulder Additionally, make sure you have Docker Engine 1.13.0+ and Docker Compose 1.10.0+ installed. If you do not, you can follow Docker's installation instructions. We recommend having at least 2GB of RAM available on your Docker host. In practice using less RAM may result in the MariaDB container failing in non-obvious ways. To run our standard battery of tests (lints, unit, integration): ./t.sh To run all unit tests: ./t.sh -u To run specific unit tests (example is of the ./va directory): ./t.sh -u -p ./va To run all integration tests: ./t.sh -i To run unit tests and integration tests with coverage: ./t.sh -ui -c --coverage-dir=./test/coverage/mytestrun To run specific integration tests (example runs TestGenerateValidity and TestWFECORS): ./t.sh -i -f TestGenerateValidity/TestWFECORS To do any of the above, but using the "config-next" configuration, which represents a likely future state (e.g. including new feature flags): ./tn.sh -your -options -here To start Boulder in a Docker container, first run: docker compose run bsetup this will write the necessary certificates into test/certs/[.softhsm-tokens,ipki,webpki]; You only need to run this once to create the certificates. If you need to remove all of the certificates and start over, you can remove the directories ./test/certs/.softhsm-tokens, ./test/certs/ipki, and ./test/certs/webpki and re-run docker compose run bsetup. Then run: docker compose up The configuration in docker-compose.yml mounts your boulder checkout at /boulder so you can edit code on your host and it will be immediately reflected inside the Docker containers run with docker compose. If you have problems with Docker, you may want to try removing all containers and volumes. By default, Boulder uses a fake DNS resolver that resolves all hostnames to 127.0.0.1. This is suitable for running integration tests inside the Docker container. If you want Boulder to be able to communicate with a client running on your host instead, you should find your host's Docker IP with: ifconfig docker0 | grep "inet addr:" | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}' And edit docker-compose.yml to change the FAKE_DNS environment variable to match. This will cause Boulder's stubbed-out DNS resolver (sd-test-srv) to respond to all A queries with the address in FAKE_DNS. If you use a host-based firewall (e.g. ufw or iptables) make sure you allow connections from the Docker instance to your host on the required validation ports to your ACME client. Alternatively, you can override the docker-compose.yml default with an environmental variable using -e (replace 172.17.0.1 with the host IPv4 address found in the command above) docker compose run --use-aliases -e FAKE_DNS=172.17.0.1 --service-ports boulder ./start.py Running tests without the ./test.sh wrapper: Run unit tests locally, without docker (only works for