Developer Guide¶

Table of Contents

Getting Started ¶

Running a local copy of the client ¶

Running the client in developer mode from your local tree is a little different than running certbot-auto. To get set up, do these things once:

git clone https://github.com/certbot/certbot
cd certbot
./letsencrypt-auto-source/letsencrypt-auto --os-packages-only
./tools/venv.sh

Then in each shell where you’re working on the client, do:

source ./venv/bin/activate

After that, your shell will be using the virtual environment, and you run the client by typing:

certbot

Activating a shell in this way makes it easier to run unit tests with tox and integration tests, as described below. To reverse this, you can type deactivate. More information can be found in the virtualenv docs.

Find issues to work on ¶

You can find the open issues in the github issue tracker. Comparatively easy ones are marked Good Volunteer Task. If you’re starting work on something, post a comment to let others know and seek feedback on your plan where appropriate.

Once you’ve got a working branch, you can open a pull request. All changes in your pull request must have thorough unit test coverage, pass our tests, and be compliant with the coding style.

Testing ¶

When you are working in a file foo.py, there should also be a file foo_test.py either in the same directory as foo.py or in the tests subdirectory (if there isn’t, make one). While you are working on your code and tests, run python foo_test.py to run the relevant tests.

For debugging, we recommend running pip install ipdb and putting import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace() statements inside the source code. Alternatively, you can use Python’s standard library pdb, but you won’t get TAB completion.

Once you are done with your code changes, and the tests in foo_test.py pass, run all of the unittests for Certbot with tox -e py27 (this uses Python 2.7).

Once all the unittests pass, check for sufficient test coverage using tox -e cover, and then check for code style with tox -e lint (all files) or pylint --rcfile=.pylintrc path/to/file.py (single file at a time).

Once all of the above is successful, you may run the full test suite, including integration tests, using tox. We recommend running the commands above first, because running all tests with tox is very slow, and the large amount of tox output can make it hard to find specific failures when they happen. Also note that the full test suite will attempt to modify your system’s Apache config if your user has sudo permissions, so it should not be run on a production Apache server.

If you have trouble getting the full tox suite to run locally, it is generally sufficient to open a pull request and let Github and Travis run integration tests for you.

Integration testing with the Boulder CA ¶

To run integration tests locally, you need Docker and docker-compose installed and working. Fetch and start Boulder using:

./tests/boulder-fetch.sh

If you have problems with Docker, you may want to try removing all containers and volumes and making sure you have at least 1GB of memory.

Run the integration tests using:

./tests/boulder-integration.sh

Code components and layout ¶

acme: contains all protocol specific code
certbot: main client code
certbot-apache and certbot-nginx: client code to configure specific web servers
certbot.egg-info: configuration for packaging Certbot

Plugin-architecture ¶

Certbot has a plugin architecture to facilitate support for different webservers, other TLS servers, and operating systems. The interfaces available for plugins to implement are defined in interfaces.py and plugins/common.py.

The most common kind of plugin is a “Configurator”, which is likely to implement the IAuthenticator and IInstaller interfaces (though some Configurators may implement just one of those).

There are also IDisplay plugins, which implement bindings to alternative UI libraries.

Authenticators ¶

Authenticators are plugins designed to prove that this client deserves a certificate for some domain name by solving challenges received from the ACME server. From the protocol, there are essentially two different types of challenges. Challenges that must be solved by individual plugins in order to satisfy domain validation (subclasses of DVChallenge, i.e. TLSSNI01, HTTP01, DNS) and continuity specific challenges (subclasses of ContinuityChallenge, i.e. RecoveryToken, RecoveryContact, ProofOfPossession). Continuity challenges are always handled by the ContinuityAuthenticator, while plugins are expected to handle DVChallenge types. Right now, we have two authenticator plugins, the ApacheConfigurator and the StandaloneAuthenticator. The Standalone and Apache authenticators only solve the TLSSNI01 challenge currently. (You can set which challenges your authenticator can handle through the get_chall_pref().

(FYI: We also have a partial implementation for a DNSAuthenticator in a separate branch).

Installer ¶

Installers plugins exist to actually setup the certificate in a server, possibly tweak the security configuration to make it more correct and secure (Fix some mixed content problems, turn on HSTS, redirect to HTTPS, etc). Installer plugins tell the main client about their abilities to do the latter via the supported_enhancements() call. We currently have two Installers in the tree, the ApacheConfigurator. and the NginxConfigurator. External projects have made some progress toward support for IIS, Icecast and Plesk.

Installers and Authenticators will oftentimes be the same class/object (because for instance both tasks can be performed by a webserver like nginx) though this is not always the case (the standalone plugin is an authenticator that listens on port 443, but it cannot install certs; a postfix plugin would be an installer but not an authenticator).

Installers and Authenticators are kept separate because it should be possible to use the StandaloneAuthenticator (it sets up its own Python server to perform challenges) with a program that cannot solve challenges itself (Such as MTA installers).

Installer Development ¶

There are a few existing classes that may be beneficial while developing a new IInstaller. Installers aimed to reconfigure UNIX servers may use Augeas for configuration parsing and can inherit from AugeasConfigurator class to handle much of the interface. Installers that are unable to use Augeas may still find the Reverter class helpful in handling configuration checkpoints and rollback.

Display ¶

We currently only offer a “text” mode for displays. Display plugins implement the IDisplay interface.

Writing your own plugin ¶

Certbot client supports dynamic discovery of plugins through the setuptools entry points. This way you can, for example, create a custom implementation of IAuthenticator or the IInstaller without having to merge it with the core upstream source code. An example is provided in examples/plugins/ directory.

Warning

Please be aware though that as this client is still in a developer-preview stage, the API may undergo a few changes. If you believe the plugin will be beneficial to the community, please consider submitting a pull request to the repo and we will update it with any necessary API changes.

Coding style ¶

Please:

Be consistent with the rest of the code.
Read PEP 8 - Style Guide for Python Code.

Follow the Google Python Style Guide, with the exception that we use Sphinx-style documentation:

def foo(arg):
    """Short description.

    :param int arg: Some number.

    :returns: Argument
    :rtype: int

    """
    return arg

Remember to use pylint.

Submitting a pull request ¶

Steps:

Write your code!
Make sure your environment is set up properly and that you’re in your virtualenv. You can do this by running ./tools/venv.sh. (this is a very important step)
Run tox -e lint to check for pylint errors. Fix any errors.
Run tox --skip-missing-interpreters to run the entire test suite including coverage. The --skip-missing-interpreters argument ignores missing versions of Python needed for running the tests. Fix any errors.
If your code touches communication with an ACME server/Boulder, you should run the integration tests, see integration. See `Known Issues`_ for some common failures that have nothing to do with your code.
Submit the PR.
Did your tests pass on Travis? If they didn’t, fix any errors.

Updating certbot-auto and letsencrypt-auto ¶

Updating the scripts ¶

Developers should not modify the certbot-auto and letsencrypt-auto files in the root directory of the repository. Rather, modify the letsencrypt-auto.template and associated platform-specific shell scripts in the letsencrypt-auto-source and letsencrypt-auto-source/pieces/bootstrappers directory, respectively.

Building letsencrypt-auto-source/letsencrypt-auto ¶

Once changes to any of the aforementioned files have been made, the letsencrypt-auto-source/letsencrypt-auto script should be updated. In lieu of manually updating this script, run the build script, which lives at letsencrypt-auto-source/build.py:

python letsencrypt-auto-source/build.py

Running build.py will update the letsencrypt-auto-source/letsencrypt-auto script. Note that the certbot-auto and letsencrypt-auto scripts in the root directory of the repository will remain unchanged after this script is run. Your changes will be propagated to these files during the next release of Certbot.

Opening a PR ¶

When opening a PR, ensure that the following files are committed:

letsencrypt-auto-source/letsencrypt-auto.template and letsencrypt-auto-source/pieces/bootstrappers/*
letsencrypt-auto-source/letsencrypt-auto (generated by build.py)

It might also be a good idea to double check that no changes were inadvertently made to the certbot-auto or letsencrypt-auto scripts in the root of the repository. These scripts will be updated by the core developers during the next release.

Updating the documentation ¶

In order to generate the Sphinx documentation, run the following commands:

make -C docs clean html man

This should generate documentation in the docs/_build/html directory.

Other methods for running the client ¶

Vagrant ¶

If you are a Vagrant user, Certbot comes with a Vagrantfile that automates setting up a development environment in an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS VM. To set it up, simply run vagrant up. The repository is synced to /vagrant, so you can get started with:

vagrant ssh
cd /vagrant
sudo ./venv/bin/certbot

Support for other Linux distributions coming soon.

Note

Unfortunately, Python distutils and, by extension, setup.py and tox, use hard linking quite extensively. Hard linking is not supported by the default sync filesystem in Vagrant. As a result, all actions with these commands are significantly slower in Vagrant. One potential fix is to use NFS (related issue).

Docker ¶

OSX users will probably find it easiest to set up a Docker container for development. Certbot comes with a Dockerfile (Dockerfile-dev) for doing so. To use Docker on OSX, install and setup docker-machine using the instructions at https://docs.docker.com/installation/mac/.

To build the development Docker image:

docker build -t certbot -f Dockerfile-dev .

Now run tests inside the Docker image:

docker run -it certbot bash
cd src
tox -e py27

Notes on OS dependencies ¶

OS-level dependencies can be installed like so:

letsencrypt-auto-source/letsencrypt-auto --os-packages-only

In general...

sudo is required as a suggested way of running privileged process
Python 2.6/2.7 is required
Augeas is required for the Python bindings
virtualenv and pip are used for managing other python library dependencies

Debian ¶

For squeeze you will need to:

Use virtualenv --no-site-packages -p python instead of -p python2.

FreeBSD ¶

Package installation for FreeBSD uses pkg, not ports.

FreeBSD by default uses tcsh. In order to activate virtualenv (see below), you will need a compatible shell, e.g. pkg install bash && bash.