Getting started

This page shows how to get started with verifying or issuing IRMA attributes, using the following components:

• irma server, a server that verifies or issues IRMA attributes to IRMA apps,
• irmajs, a JavaScript library for drawing the IRMA QR in your website, and handling IRMA session with the irma server.

You should have the IRMA app installed (Android, iOS). If you want to compile from source instead of using prebuilt binaries, you should additionally have Git, Go, dep, and npm installed.

Installing and running irma server

You can install the irma command line tool in the following two ways.

• Download prebuilt binary: From our CI build server. Extract the zip file, and use the binary for your OS and architecture (most likely amd64). Rename the file to /usr/local/bin/irma to have it available in your PATH.
• Compile and install from source with go and dep, as follows:

  go get -d github.com/privacybydesign/irmago
  cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/privacybydesign/irmago
  dep ensure
  go install ./irma
  

After installing the irma binary, start the server (with increased verbosity but otherwise default configuration):

irma server -v

Run irma server -h to see configuration options. In order to verify your configuration, run irma server check -v. General documentation can be found on the irma server page, API documentation of HTTP endpoints can be found on the api irma server page.

Perform a command line IRMA session

You can perform a first IRMA session using your server on the command line as follows:

irma session --server http://localhost:8088 --disclose pbdf.pbdf.irmatube.type

(IRMATube attributes are available on the IRMATube demo) page. This will print a QR that you can scan with your IRMA app, and the attribute contents after they have been received and verified by the server. irma session can also perform issuance sessions and attribute-based signature sessions. If you pass -v it logs the session request JSON that it sends to your irma server.

Installing irmajs and an example webpage

Download the irmajs source code, as zip from GitHub, or using git:

git clone https://github.com/privacybydesign/irmajs && cd irmajs

Like the irma command line tool, irmajs needs to be compiled before it can be used in the browser. This bundles all dependencies, images and CSS into one JavaScript file. You can obtain a compiled version of irmajs in one of the following two ways:

• Download prebuilt binary: From our CI build server. Extract the files into the dist folder of irmajs.
• Compile from source, as follows:

  git clone https://github.com/privacybydesign/irmajs && cd irmajs
  npm i
  npm run build
  

The irma.js JavaScript file in the dist folder (or from the zip file) can now be included in a <script> tag in your website.

Examples for the browser and for nodejs are included in the examples folder.

Perform browser IRMA session

(Re)start your irma server, configuring it such that it statically hosts the irmajs example webpage we just built:

irma server -v --static-path ~/irmajs/examples/browser

A webpage demoing IRMA attribute issuance verification should now be available at http://localhost:8088.

Open the browser console and the console running irma server to see various log messages and possibly error messages as the IRMA session proceeds.