a2bd667c69
We already have a pretty powerful IPC framework in place to communicate between the GUI and the service process. The deeplink implemenation uses the same IPC mechanisms (UDS / pipes), yet it is effectively a re-implementation of what we already have, just with less functionality. In order to provide a more sophisticated handling of the case where Firezone is launched again while it is already running, we refactor the deeplink module to reuse the existing IPC framework. This makes it quite easy to then reuse this in order to ping the already running Firezone process that a new instance was launched. For now, this doesn't do anything other than writing a log entry. This however lays enough ground-work for us to then implement a more sophisticated handling of that case in the future, e.g. open new windows etc. One caveat here is that we are now trying to connect to an existing IPC socket on every startup, even the first one. Our IPC code has a retry loop of 10 iterations to be more resilient on Windows when connecting to pipes. Without any further changes, this would now delay the start of Firezone always by 1s because we would try to connect to the socket 10x before concluding that we are the first instance. To fix this, we make the number of attempts configurable and set it to 1 when attempting to the GUI IPC socket to avoid unnecessary delays in starting up the Client. Related: #5143.
gui-client
This crate houses a GUI client for Linux and Windows.
Setup (Ubuntu)
To compile natively for x86_64 Linux:
- Install rustup
- Install pnpm
sudo apt-get install build-essential curl file libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev libssl-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libxdo-dev wget
Setup (Windows)
To compile natively for x86_64 Windows:
- Install rustup
- Install pnpm
Recommended IDE Setup
(From Tauri's default README)
Building
Builds are best started from the frontend tool pnpm. This ensures typescript
and css is compiled properly before bundling the application.
See the package.json script for more details as to what's
going on under the hood.
# Builds a release exe
pnpm build
# Linux:
# The release exe and deb package are up in the workspace.
stat ../target/release/firezone
stat ../target/release/bundle/deb/*.deb
# Windows:
# The release exe and MSI installer should be up in the workspace.
# The exe can run without being installed
stat ../target/release/Firezone.exe
stat ../target/release/bundle/msi/Firezone_0.0.0_x64_en-US.msi
Signing the Windows MSI in GitHub CI
The MSI is signed in GitHub CI using the firezone/firezone repository's
secrets. This was originally set up using these guides for inspiration:
- https://melatonin.dev/blog/how-to-code-sign-windows-installers-with-an-ev-cert-on-github-actions/
- https://support.globalsign.com/code-signing/code-signing-using-azure-key-vault
Renewing / issuing a new code signing certificate and associated Azure entities is outside the scope of this section. Use the guides above if this needs to be done.
Instead, you'll most likely simply need to rotate the Azure CodeSigning Application's client secret.
To do so, login to the Azure portal using your @firezoneprod.onmicrosoft.com account.
Try to access it via the following deep-link.
If that doesn't work:
- Go to the
Microsoft Entra IDservice - Click on
App Registrations - Make sure the tab
All applicationsis selected - Find and navigate to the
CodeSigningapp registration - Client on
client credentials - Click
New client secret - Note down the secret value. This should be entered into the GitHub repository's secrets as
AZURE_CLIENT_SECRET.
Running
From this dir:
# This will start the frontend tools in watch mode and then run `tauri dev`
pnpm dev
# You can call debug subcommands on the exe from this directory too
# e.g. this is equivalent to `cargo run -- debug hostname`
cargo tauri dev -- -- debug hostname
# The exe is up in the workspace
stat ../target/debug/Firezone.exe
The app's config and logs will be stored at
C:\Users\$USER\AppData\Local\dev.firezone.client.
Platform support
Ubuntu 22.04 and newer is supported.
Tauri says it should work on Windows 10, Version 1803 and up. Older versions may work if you manually install WebView2
x86_64 architecture is supported for Windows. aarch64 and x86_64 are supported for Linux.
Threat model
See Security