Guide to setting up your very own ILP Kit. Estimated time: a couple of hours.

ILP Kit installation

Get a server instance

Buy server

On DigitalOcean, click Create Droplet.
Select the option with 2 Gb of RAM (the $20 one).
For the operating system, go to One-Click Apps and select Node 6.9.1.
Select your ssh keys, and then confirm the purchase.

I've named my server instance 'Niles', so that's the name I'll be using for the rest of the instructions.

Set up SSH host

Edit ~/.ssh/config
Add the lines:

Host niles
  Hostname 45.55.4.124 # IP from DigitalOcean
  User root
  Port 22

Server setup

Log into your server

$ ssh niles

Install necessary packages

root$ apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
root$ apt-get install libssl-dev python build-essential libpq-dev postgresql postgresql-contrib

Add a non-root user

# you don't want to stay logged in as root
root$ adduser sharafian
root$ usermod -aG sudo sharafian

Do the rest of this guide while logged in as your new user.

Postgresql setup

# now do some of the postgresql setup
$ sudo su - postgres
postgres$ createuser sharafian
postgres$ psql

# postgres prompt
postgres=# ALTER USER sharafian WITH PASSWORD 'PASSWORD';
ALTER ROLE
postgres=# \q

postgres$ createdb ilpkit
postgres$ exit

Ilp Kit setup

$ cd

# clone the ilp kit repository and install dependencies.

$ git clone https://github.com/interledgerjs/ilp-kit
$ npm install # this fails on the `node-gyp rebuild` step, due to a known error
$ npm rebuild node-sass # but running this will remedy any problems
$ npm run build

Domain setup

Subdomain setup

Go to your name server provider of choice. I'm using cloudflare on my domain.
Go to the DNS settings, and add an A record.
I want my ilp kit on niles.sharafian.com, so I'll create an A record pointing niles to my DigitalOcean machine's IP, 45.55.4.124

Set up SSL

Before you get SSL enabled, you'll want to have an actual webserver running. Because we're on Ubuntu, letsencrypt provides a package that does most of the set up for us on nginx.

$ sudo apt-get install nginx letsencrypt

Now follow DigitalOcean's letsencrypt instructions, here in order to get SSL set up.

After following these instructions, you should go to your site (eg. niles.sharafian.com), and it should show the nginx example page over an https connection.

Set up proxy for ILP Kit

In your /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default, remove the location / block, and add these two blocks in its place:

# point the root to the ILP Kit UI
location / {
		proxy_pass http://localhost:3010;

		proxy_http_version 1.1;
		proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
		proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
}

# allow webfinger and letsencrypt to coexist
location ~ /.well-known/webfinger {
                proxy_pass http://localhost:3010;

                proxy_http_version 1.1;
                proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
                proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
}

Now run sudo nginx -t to make sure you didn't mess anything up.
If that ran OK, run sudo systemctl restart nginx.

This is all the domain setup that you have to do. Nothing will appear on the site until you're running your ILP Kit.

ILP Kit configuration

Register account

Before you do anything on your own ILP Kit, you're going to want to register an account on someone else's. Go to the ILP Kit of a friend, and create an account with them. For example, I'll create the account niles on nexus.justmoon.com. I'll refer to my password as PASSWORD.

This means that my identifier for my account on Nexus is [email protected]. We'll use that identifier later.

Configure environment

Run npm run configure. It provides example values, and I'll also put the configuration I'm using.

Posgres DB URI: postgres://sharafian:PASSWORD@localhost/ilpkit
Hostname: niles.sharafian.com
Ledger name: niles
Currency code: USD
Country code: US
Configure GitHub: n (we don't need that just yet; you can always go back and change it)
Configure Mailgun: n (same deal)
ILP Peers: us.usd.nexus.stefan (this means I send my routes to [email protected]. If you want to peer with somebody, ask them for their connector's ILP address. You have to have an account on their ledger in order to peer).
Username: niles
Password: (use the randomly generated default)

Now this will prompt for Plugins. A plugin connects to a ledger, using your credentials. The configuration tool will automatically make to connect to my own ledger. I'm also going to create a plugin for our account on Nexus, though.

Webfinger identifier: [email protected] (this is the same identifier from earlier)
Currency code: USD
Country code: us
Password: PASSWORD
Enter another plugin: n (we only made one account to connect to)

Launch ILP Kit

You can create a systemd config for ILP Kit, but I'm just going to use nohup to run ILP Kit independent of our SSH session.

$ nohup npm start &
$ tail -f nohup.out -n 1000

Your connector will fail to launch, because this its account doesn't exist yet. Just go to your site (eg. https://niles.sharafian.com), and register a new user with the exact same username/password you entered for your ledger during npm run configure, (eg. user: niles pass: PASSWORD).

Run killall -9 node, and then launch the ilp kit again with:

$ nohup npm start &
$ tail -f nohup.out -n 1000

You'll see your connector connect successfully.

Issue some money

So you've got a ledger all set up, with a UI and a connector to another ILP kit. But nobody on your ledger has any money. To remedy this, you can make an issuer account.

Just go to your site and register a new account called issuer (that name is just a convention, it can be whatever you want). Now open ~/ilp-kit/env.list on your remote machine, and note down the admin username and password. Use httpie on any machine to run:

curl -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -X PUT https://niles.sharafian.com/ledger/accounts/issuer --user admin:PASSWORD -d '{"minimum_allowed_balance":"-infinity","balance":"0","is_disabled":false, "id":"https://niles.sharafian.com/ledger/accounts/issuer","name":"issuer"}'

Replace niles.sharafian.com with your domain, and replace PASSWORD with your own admin password. Now if you log in as issuer, you can send money to your primary account to have some cash.

sharafian/README.md

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