127 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
127 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
Welcome to GNU Taler
|
|
|
|
|
|
What is Taler?
|
|
==============
|
|
|
|
Taler is an electronic payment system providing the ability to pay
|
|
anonymously using digital cash. Taler consists of a network protocol
|
|
definition (using a RESTful API over HTTP), a Exchange (which creates
|
|
digital coins), a Wallet (which allows customers to manage, store and
|
|
spend digital coins), and a Merchant website which allows customers to
|
|
spend their digital coins. Naturally, each Merchant is different, but
|
|
Taler includes code examples to help Merchants integrate Taler as a
|
|
payment system.
|
|
|
|
Taler is currently developed by a worldwide group of independent free
|
|
software developers and the DECENTRALISE team at Inria Rennes. Taler
|
|
is free software and a GNU package (http://www.gnu.org/).
|
|
|
|
This is an alpha release with a few known bugs, lacking a few
|
|
important features, documentation, testing, performance tuning and an
|
|
external security audit. However, you can run the code and it largely
|
|
works fine. that does not work yet. This package also only includes
|
|
the Taler exchange, not the other components of the system.
|
|
|
|
Documentation about Taler can be found at http://taler.net/.
|
|
Our bug tracker is at https://gnunet.org/bugs/.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dependencies:
|
|
=============
|
|
|
|
These are the direct dependencies for running a Taler exchange:
|
|
|
|
- GNUnet >= 0.10.2
|
|
- GNU libmicrohttpd >= 0.9.55
|
|
- Postgres >= 9.5
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Project structure is currently as follows:
|
|
|
|
src/include/
|
|
-- installed headers for public APIs
|
|
|
|
src/util/
|
|
-- common utility functions (currency representation,
|
|
Taler-specific cryptography, Taler-specific json
|
|
support)
|
|
|
|
src/pq/
|
|
-- Postgres-specific utility functions
|
|
|
|
src/exchangedb/
|
|
-- Exchange database backend (with DB-specific plugins)
|
|
|
|
src/exchange/
|
|
-- taler exchange server
|
|
|
|
src/exchange-tools/
|
|
-- taler exchange helper programs
|
|
|
|
src/exchange-lib/
|
|
-- libtalerexchange: C API to issue HTTP requests to exchange
|
|
|
|
|
|
Getting Started
|
|
==============
|
|
|
|
The following steps illustrate how to set up a exchange HTTP server.
|
|
They take as a stub for configuring the exchange the content of 'contrib/exchange-template/config/'.
|
|
|
|
1) Create a 'test/' directory and copy the stubs in it:
|
|
|
|
mkdir -p test/config/
|
|
cp exchange/contrib/exchange-template/config/* test/config/
|
|
cd test/
|
|
|
|
2) Create the exchange's master with the tool 'gnunet-ecc':
|
|
|
|
gnunet-ecc -g1 master.priv
|
|
|
|
3) Edit config/exchange-common.conf by replacing the right value on the line with the
|
|
MASTER_PUBLIC_KEY entry with the fresh generated (ASCII version of) master.priv.
|
|
This ASCII version is obtained by issuing:
|
|
|
|
gnunet-ecc -p master.priv
|
|
|
|
4) Generate other exchange related keys ('denomination' and 'signing' keys), by issuing:
|
|
|
|
taler-exchange-keyup -d `pwd` -m master.priv
|
|
|
|
5) Check with:
|
|
|
|
taler-exchange-keycheck -d `pwd`
|
|
|
|
6) A exchange needs a database to operate, so the following instructions relate to
|
|
how to set up PostgreSQL. On debian, the two packages needed are:
|
|
|
|
* postgresql
|
|
* postgresql-client
|
|
|
|
For other operating systems, please refer to the relevant documentation.
|
|
|
|
In this settlement, the exchange wll use a database called 'talercheck' and will
|
|
run under the username through which 'taler-exchange-httpd' is launched. Thus assuming
|
|
that this user is 'demo', we need to create a 'demo' role for postgresql and make
|
|
him the owner of 'talercheck' database.
|
|
|
|
To perform these administrative tasks we have to impersonate the 'postgres' (by default,
|
|
postgres installation assigns privileges to such a user) user, then connect to the running DBMS.
|
|
Issue the following:
|
|
|
|
su # give your root password
|
|
su - postgres
|
|
psql # this is the command-line client to the DMBS
|
|
# the following lines are SQL
|
|
CREATE USER demo;
|
|
CREATE DATABASE talercheck OWNER demo;
|
|
# quit with CTRL-D
|
|
|
|
7) If any previous step has been successful, it is now possbile to start up the
|
|
exchange web server (by default it will listen on port 4241); issue:
|
|
|
|
|
|
taler-exchange-httpd -d `pwd` # assuming we did not move outside of the 'test' directory
|