Implement the iOS wrapper generator

[karalabe]

No description provided.

[Brandl]

Would love to help out with this, since this would be awesome for a project I'm thinking about. Clear win-win.

Do you have any pointers for me on where to start?

[karalabe]

Hey! Honestly, it's probably going to be a rough ride :D Took me a lot of pain to figure out the Linux counterparts and set up a reliable builder and auto-upgrader for it. That said, I'd appreciate any help. Perhaps macos is the best starting point, since iOS is just a flavor of it.

There are 3 things that need to be done to get a platform supported:

• Figure out how to even build the thing (doh). My initial work was based off of https://github.com/cretz/tor-static, which supports Linux, Windows and MacOS. We need to figure out exactly what the dependencies are for osx.
• The wrapper script in build needs to be expanded so it can somehow figure out what exact C files are needed for macos. For Linux I used make --dry-run to figure out what C files I need, and wrap them into Go. This gets messy for other platforms due to the next step.
• Integrate the wrapping so it runs on Linux (hence why it's hard to figure out what deps we have). The reason I need Linux, is because of the auto update mechanism. Every night a travis cron job pulls the latest stable code from all dependent C projects and updates this repo if it can build it.

The problematic part is the auto-updater. OpenSSL and Tor get new commits added on top almost every day. It doesn't scale to manually pull those and mess with the builds, so we need a fully automated process. My current solution works for Linux and Android, not sure what the best approach is to support others. The issue with a pure Linux approach is that even if I generate the wrappers, I can't test-compile in the same Travis job.

An alternative crazy approach is to surf git branches and Travis jobs until you get back to master:

• Take the code from master, do the current Linux builds, verify on Linux and Android, and if successful, push to staging-1 (need a better name).
• When a push is detected on staging-1, launch a new travis build (webhook) to do the same thing, but on a macos instance. Verify on macos and iOS, and if successful, push to staging-2.
• Rinse and repeat for Windows. If everything's successful, push back to master.

Yes, it's quite a crazy workflow, but this is the only design I could dream up until now where I can more or less guarantee that I wrap the correct files and also test it so I don't break a previously working code.

If you're still up for it, you could try to start with playing with the wrapper in the build folder and see what modifications are needed to cover macos. We can go from there on how best integrate that without breaking Linux :)

[ciehanski]

Hey @karalabe! I use go-libtor for my project onionbox and would love to help out wherever possible. I did assist cretz with getting tor-static to automatically build binaries here for all platforms (except windows 👎), so I thought I'd take a stab at this as well.

I'll reach out if I have any issues or questions.

[Brandl]

Hey,

I now started to actively build upon go-libtor for a project and this has become somewhat of an important issue for us. Would happily dedicated some time to get this working aswell.

@ciehanski Any progress on this? Wanna share some insights since you solved this for tor-static already?

[n8fr8]

Hopefully you have seen https://github.com/iCepa/Tor.framework which is used by Onion Browser for iOS, ChatSecure iOS and other apps. Would love for this framework to work on iOS as well.

[Jonty]

It may be worth moving the auto-update process to CircleCI (it's free for OSS), as they have support for Linux, Mac, and Windows. That way you could run all three update build tests in parallel and only have the pipeline commit the update if all three pass, which would solve the problem of having to do the update on Linux.

[karalabe]

Travis also supports macos and they are rolling out Windows so that should be workable too. The most obvious blocker is that I don't have a mac to test with :D