Set up Ikar with basic auth

⚠️ Please note that Ikar is a tool for testing. It is not recommended to be used as a tool for managing your wallets!

Set the stage

This step-by-step describes how to set up basic authentication to the Ikar app on nginx.

Without basic authentication (not recommended)

⚠️ It is not really recommended because whole world will have access to your cardano-wallet without any sort of authentication...

In any case, it is just as simple as:

docker pull piotrstachyra/icarus
docker run -d --network host --rm piotrstachyra/icarus

Immediately you should have Ikar available on http://your-ip:4444/. 🎉

With basic authentication (recommended)

Ok, Ikar does not have it's own authentication mechanism but it is extremely easy to set up using nginx and apache2-utils (Debian, Ubuntu) or httpd-tools (RHEL/CentOS/Oracle Linux).

Installation

To install nginx and apache2-utils.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx
sudo apt-get install apache2-utils

Configure users

To add some user credentials do:

For the first user:

sudo htpasswd -c /etc/nginx/htcontrol user1

For any subsequent user:

sudo htpasswd /etc/nginx/htcontrol user2

Configure nginx

Edit nginx.conf:

nginx
sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Comment this line like this:

# include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;

Add this into http secion:

  server {

      location / {
           proxy_pass            http://localhost:4444/;
           auth_basic            "Ikar";
           auth_basic_user_file  htcontrol;

       }
   }

Reload nginx config:

sudo nginx -s reload

Set up Ikar

ℹ️ Ikar likes to fly high that is why it binds to 0.0.0.0 by default. We will be serving it via nginx so we don't want it to be available like that, and that is why we tell him to bind to localhost via ICARUS_BIND_ADDR=localhost.

In any case, it's just as simple as:

docker pull piotrstachyra/icarus
docker run -d -e ICARUS_BIND_ADDR=localhost --network host --rm piotrstachyra/icarus

🎉

There you go! Now your Icarus should be available under http://your-ip/, but before you can use it, you will be first prompted to authenticate.

👇