Awala Ping for Desktop

The Awala Ping for Desktop is a CLI implementation of the Awala Ping Service, which is meant to help test Awala itself.

This document is aimed at advanced users and (prospective) contributors. To learn more about using Awala in general, visit awala.network/users.

Install

This tool is available as the NPM package @relaycorp/awala-ping. To install it globally, run:

npm install -g @relaycorp/awala-ping

Use

Sending pings

To send a ping, run:

awala-ping ping

The command above will wait until the pong message is received.

Sending pings to custom endpoints

By default, the ping subcommand will communicate with the public endpoint at ping.awala.services. If you wish to use a different endpoint, you need to:

1. Download the identity certificate for the public endpoint with which you want to communicate.
2. Import the endpoint first with the third-party-endpoints import-public subcommand. For example:

   awala-ping third-party-endpoints import-public < /path/to/connection-params.der

3. Specify the Internet address of your custom endpoint when you send pings. For example:

   awala-ping ping your-endpoint.com

Registering with the private gateway

By default, the ping subcommand will register with the Awala Gateway for Desktop if the app hasn't been registered yet. To register explicitly, run:

awala-ping register

Each registration will create an Awala endpoint internally. The latest endpoint to be created will become the default one.

Security and privacy considerations

The items below summarize the security and privacy considerations specific to this app. For a more general overview of the security considerations in Awala, please refer to RS-019.

No personally-identifiable information is stored

This app only stores cryptographically-generated data whose inputs are not derived in any way from personally-identifiable information.

External communication

This app only communicates with the following:

• The private gateway.
• Any public endpoint that the user sends pings to. By default, the Relaycorp-operated public endpoint at ping.awala.services is used.

This app doesn't track usage (for example, using Google Analytics), nor does it use ads.

Development

To install this app in development, simply run npm install from the root of the repository.

To run a subcommand in the CLI, pass the subcommand name to the command npm run run --. For example, to send a ping, run:

npm run run -- ping

Contributing

We love contributions! If you haven't contributed to a Relaycorp project before, please take a minute to read our guidelines first.