Setting up the development environment

Prerequisites

Steps

Install the Prerequisites

For macOS, we recommend using Homebrew to manage the development prereqs. The Xcode command line tools will be installed as part of the Homebrew installation.

Once Homebrew is ready, installing the necessary prerequisites is very easy:

brew install git go jq softhsm
brew cask install --appdir="/Applications" docker

Docker Desktop must be launched to complete the installation so be sure to open the application after installing it:

open /Applications/Docker.app

Developing on Windows

On Windows 10 you should use the native Docker distribution and you may use the Windows PowerShell. However, for the binaries command to succeed you will still need to have the uname command available. You can get it as part of Git but beware that only the 64bit version is supported.

Before running any git clone commands, run the following commands:

git config --global core.autocrlf false
git config --global core.longpaths true

You can check the setting of these parameters with the following commands:

git config --get core.autocrlf
git config --get core.longpaths

These need to be false and true respectively.

The curl command that comes with Git and Docker Toolbox is old and does not handle properly the redirect used in Getting Started - Install. Make sure you have and use a newer version which can be downloaded from the cURL downloads page

Clone the Hyperledger Fabric source

First navigate to https://github.com/hyperledger/fabric and fork the fabric repository using the fork button in the top-right corner. After forking, clone the repository.

mkdir -p github.com/<your_github_userid>
cd github.com/<your_github_userid>
git clone https://github.com/<your_github_userid>/fabric

Note

If you are running Windows, before cloning the repository, run the following command:

git config --get core.autocrlf

If core.autocrlf is set to true, you must set it to false by running:

git config --global core.autocrlf false

Configure SoftHSM

A PKCS #11 cryptographic token implementation is required to run the unit tests. The PKCS #11 API is used by the bccsp component of Fabric to interact with hardware security modules (HSMs) that store cryptographic information and perform cryptographic computations. For test environments, SoftHSM can be used to satisfy this requirement.

SoftHSM generally requires additional configuration before it can be used. For example, the default configuration will attempt to store token data in a system directory that unprivileged users are unable to write to.

SoftHSM configuration typically involves copying /etc/softhsm/softhsm2.conf to $HOME/.config/softhsm2/softhsm2.conf and changing directories.tokendir to an appropriate location. Please see the man page for softhsm2.conf for details.

After SoftHSM has been configured, the following command can be used to initialize the token required by the unit tests:

softhsm2-util --init-token --slot 0 --label ForFabric --so-pin 1234 --pin 98765432

If tests are unable to locate the libsofthsm2.so library in your environment, specify the library path, the PIN, and the label of your token in the appropriate environment variables. For example, on macOS:

export PKCS11_LIB="/usr/local/Cellar/softhsm/2.6.1/lib/softhsm/libsofthsm2.so"
export PKCS11_PIN=98765432
export PKCS11_LABEL="ForFabric"

The tests don’t always clean up after themselves and, over time, this causes the PKCS #11 tests to take a long time to run. The easiest way to recover from this is to delete and recreate the token.

softhsm2-util --delete-token --token ForFabric
softhsm2-util --init-token --slot 0 --label ForFabric --so-pin 1234 --pin 98765432

Debugging with pkcs11-spy

The OpenSC Project provides a shared library called pkcs11-spy that logs all interactions between an application and a PKCS #11 module. This library can be very useful when troubleshooting interactions with a cryptographic token device or service.

Once the library has been installed, configure Fabric to use pkcs11-spy as the PKCS #11 library and set the PKCS11SPY environment variable to the real library. For example:

export PKCS11_LIB="/usr/lib/softhsm/libsofthsm2.so"
export PKCS11SPY="/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkcs11/pkcs11-spy.so"

Install the development tools

Once the repository is cloned, you can use make to install some of the tools used in the development environment. By default, these tools will be installed into $HOME/go/bin. Please be sure your PATH includes that directory.

make gotools

After installing the tools, the build environment can be verified by running a few commands.

make basic-checks integration-test-prereqs
ginkgo -r ./integration/nwo

If those commands completely successfully, you’re ready to Go!

If you plan to use the Hyperledger Fabric application SDKs then be sure to check out their prerequisites in the Node.js SDK README, Java SDK README, and Go SDK README.