ooni/probe-cli

About this project

The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) is a non-profit free software project that aims to empower decentralized efforts in documenting Internet censorship around the world.

This repository contains the following Go packages:

1. the command line client (cmd/ooniprobe);

2. the test helper server (internal/cmd/oohelperd);

3. the mobile library (pkg/oonimkall);

4. the measurement-engine library (internal).

Every top-level directory in this repository contains an explanatory README file.

Install instructions

Follow the instructions at ooni.org/install/cli to install ooniprobe precompiled binaries for Windows, macOS, and Debian/Ubuntu. Once ooniprobe is installed, refer to the user guide.

Developer instructions

This repository requires exactly the Go version mentioned by the GOVERSION file. Using a different version of Go may work as intended but is not recommended: we depend on packages forked from the standard library; so, it is more robust to use the same version of Go from which we forked those packages from.

You will also need a C compiler. On Linux and other Unix systems both GCC and Clang will work. If you're using Windows, we recommend installing Ubuntu or Debian on the Windows Subsystem for Linux. If you're targeting Windows, you should also install the mingw-w64 cross-compiler.

Debian developer setup

The following commands show how to setup a development environment using Debian 12 ("bookworm"). The same instructions should also work for Debian-based distribution (e.g., Ubuntu).

# install the compilers, git, and the root CA
sudo apt install golang build-essential ca-certificates git

# [optional] install mingw-w64 if you're targeting windows
sudo apt install mingw-w64

# install the required go version binary
go install -v golang.org/dl/go1.20.5@latest

# fetch the whole go distribution
$HOME/go/bin/go1.20.5 download

Fedora developer setup

The following commands show how to setup a development environment using Fedora.

# install the compilers and git
sudo dnf install golang make gcc gcc-c++ git

# [optional] install mingw-w64 if you're targeting windows
sudo dnf install mingw64-gcc mingw64-gcc-c++

# install the required go version binary
go install -v golang.org/dl/go1.20.5@latest

# fetch the whole go distribution
$HOME/go/bin/go1.20.5 download

macOS developer setup

The following commands show how to setup a development environment using macOS. We assume you have already installed Homebrew, which should also install the Xcode command line tools.

Then, you need to follow these instructions:

# install the compiler
brew install go

# install the required go version binary
go install -v golang.org/dl/go1.20.5@latest

# fetch the whole go distribution
$HOME/go/bin/go1.20.5 download

Build instructions

Once you have installed the correct Go version and a C compiler, you can compile ooniprobe using:

$HOME/go/bin/go1.20.5 build -v -ldflags '-s -w' ./cmd/ooniprobe

This command will generate a stripped binary called ooniprobe in the toplevel directory.

Likewise, you can compile miniooni using:

$HOME/go/bin/go1.20.5 build -v -ldflags '-s -w' ./internal/cmd/miniooni

This command will generate a stripped binary called miniooni in the toplevel directory.

And oohelperd using:

$HOME/go/bin/go1.20.5 build -v -ldflags '-s -w' ./internal/cmd/oohelperd

This command will generate a stripped binary called oohelperd in the toplevel directory.

Contributing

Please, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-3.0-or-later

Updating dependencies

go get -t -u -v ./... && go mod tidy

Releasing

Create an issue according to the routine release template and perform any item inside the check-list.

We build releases using Makefile, which requires GNU make. Run make help for detailed usage.

Semantic versioning policy

The mobile library is a public package for technical reasons. Go mobile tools require a public package to build from. Yet, we don't consider API breakages happening in such a package to be sufficient to bump our major version number. For us, the mobile library is just a mean to implement OONI Probe Android and OONI Probe iOS. We'll only bump the major version number if we change ./cmd/ooniprobe's CLI.