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Dedicated Setup Introduction

Setting up LunaDefend

For now, LunaDefend has native support for applications that use React on the frontend and Express or Apollo-GraphQL on the backend. Other frontend frameworks are on the development roadmap, including Vue. Java backend support is in alpha.

info

To see a full demonstration while you follow this guide, you can follow along in the demo app.

CLI

The LunaDefend CLI makes development, testing, and deployment easier. It can bring up the services we need to use LunaDefend locally.

The CLI is available as an NPM module. Add it to your package.json along with the aws cdk packages that it depends on:

yarn add @lunasec/cli --dev

or

npm install @lunasec/cli --save-dev

Make sure the CLI stays at the same version as the @lunasec packages we install in this guide.

tip

You can also install the CLI package globally with yarn global add @lunasec/cli to make manual commands easier - it will automatically use the locally installed copy if you are in your app folder. Call lunasec --version to try it out.

Prerequisites

Your system must have docker-compose, docker, and node >= 14 installed.

Starting LunaDefend

Now that the CLI is installed we can run:

lunasec --version

and we should see that the CLI is installed.

The LunaDefend CLI needs to be configured to know where your application's front and back end are. To do this, in the root of your repository create the file lunadefend.js with the contents:

module.exports = {
development: {
applicationFrontEnd: '<front end url>',
applicationBackEnd: '<back end url>'
}
}
Full options

A full list of configuration options can be found in the CLI config typedoc.

LunaDefend needs the front end url to properly enforce its CORS policy and back end to be running when it starts so that it can query it for signing keys.

Once we install the LunaDefend plugin into the back end (covered on the next page), we can run:

lunasec start

which will start the LunaDefend stack. Depending on your internet speed, this might take a minute.

lunasec start brings up the parts of LunaDefend you will need for local development, which consists of:

  • the Tokenizer Backend
  • Localstack
  • HTTPS proxy to Localstack
  • Secure Frame iFrame server

LunaDefend will start with a clean database on every launch.

If you'd like to also launch a demo app to try out LunaDefend, instead run lunasec start --env demo, as described in the Demo Application docs.

Password Prompt

You'll be prompted for your password because the cli launches docker as root.
You can pass --no-sudo to the start command in order to have docker-compose run without sudo. True rootless docker isn't yet supported, but if you have dangerously added your user to the docker group it will work without sudo. This is not recommended for security reasons.

Now that the CLI is installed, let's add LunaDefend to the code. Backend setup