🛝 Verifiable Credential Playground

A minimalistic verifiable credential utility application designed to sign VC-JWTs and expose a basic DID document based on Gaia-X standards.

Getting Started

This project contains two main components: - a backend which takes care of DID and signing related work - a frontend giving a warm welcome to end-users

Run Locally

Before running anything, please build a basic backend ./backend/.env file by running:

cd backend/
npm run generate-env

It will give you an openssl command to run to generate the required certificate which much then be pasted in the newly created ./backend/.env.

With Docker Compose

To run this project with Docker Compose, you need to run the following command at the root of the project:

docker compose up -d --build

This will build and start two containers, one for the frontend and one for the backend.
You can now use your very one Verifiable Credential Playground at: http://localhost:3000/playground.

When you are finished, you can stop the services with this command:

docker compose down

With NPM

The frontend can be run with:

cd frontend
npm run dev

And the backend can be run with:

cd backend
npm run start:dev

You can now use your very one Verifiable Credential Playground at: http://localhost:3000/playground.

Run the CI locally

Please use gitlab-ci-local to be able to test the CI locally.

On top, please deploy a local registry to allow gitlab-ci-local to run all the registry work locally as well

docker network create gitlab-ci-local-registry
docker run -d -p 127.0.0.1:5000:5000 --network gitlab-ci-local-registry --name gitlab-ci-local-registry registry:2

Customizing

Each main component has environment variables that allow you to customize your playground.

Frontend

Backend

Deploying

Although this project is mainly for demonstration purposes, it can be used in a production environment and be hosted via Kubernetes for example.

The instance at vc-jwt.io is hosted on a Kubernetes cluster in the form of a deployment with two frontend and backend containers.

The backend container is mapped to the https://vc-jwt.io/ root URL as the /.well-known/did.json address must be linked to the root URL for DID resolving purposes. The frontend container is mapped to https://vc-jwt.io/playground so the URL corresponds to the one used for local execution.

[!TIP] If you are using Let's Encrypt certificates we suggest you use the private key, public key and certificate in the backend environment variables. Let's Encrypt certificates are allowed on the Gaia-X development environments.

Also, if you are using cert-manager you can use an init container to derive the public key from the certificate's secret private key to then inject it as a backend environment variable.

Using Helm

To make the deployment task easier, a Helm chart has been provided in the helm/ folder.

We recommend deploying this application via ArgoCD but the vanilla Helm CLI is sufficient to get things running.

Variables

Please checkout the helm/values.yaml file to find which variables you can customize for your deployment. The usual variables produced by the helm create command are available but some specific ones exist as described in the table below, modifying those is sufficient to get the application running.