/lantern

Defeat censorship. Give or get access to the open internet with people around the world through your social network.

Primary LanguageJavaGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

Lantern

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Lantern allows you to give or get access to the internet through other users around the world connected by a peer-to-peer network.

Lantern is open source, written primarily in Java and runs on modern OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux desktop systems.

screenshot

Setting up a development environment

  1. Ensure you have the requirements installed:
  • git (brew install git, port install git-core, etc.)
  • Java 1.6+
    • On Windows, make sure to use a 32-bit Java, even if you're running 64-bit Windows.
    • On Ubuntu, make sure you use Oracle's JDK and not OpenJDK.
  • You can install Maven manually or with your package manager: brew install maven, port install maven3, etc.
  1. Clone the repository and its submodules with git clone --recursive git://github.com/getlantern/lantern.git or fork first and use your fork's url to be able to commit changes.

    If you have already checked out Lantern but did not pass '--recursive', you can clone the submodules with git submodule update --init.

  2. Run the build-and-run script from within the lantern directory: cd lantern; ./run.bash

That script will fetch the required libraries, build, and run Lantern. There's also a quickRun.bash script that will just run Lantern once it's already been built.

Lantern binds its HTTP API to a random port and prefix for security. The port and prefix are chosen at first run. It can be found in .lantern/serverAddress

Lantern's UI is developed as a separate project and included inside the lantern repo as a git submodule. Please see https://github.com/getlantern/lantern-ui for more.

If you want to run Lantern in headless mode, pass --disable-ui. This is useful for running Lantern on a server without an X environment.

If you're running Linux, note that Lantern's UI currently targets the Ubuntu 12.04+ desktop environment (i.e. Unity). Other environments may work as well but are currently untested.

If you want to load the Lantern source code in Eclipse, you can do the following:

  1. Build the Eclipse project and classpath files: mvn eclipse:eclipse

  2. Load them into Eclipse using File->Import->General->Existing Projects into Workspace Select the directory where you ran mvn eclipse:eclipse, and you should see the "lantern" project loaded into Eclipse.

  3. Define the M2_REPO classpath variable, e.g.:

    • Open Eclipse->Preferences->Java->Build Path->Classpath Variables
    • Press "New..."
    • Enter M2_REPO as the name and $HOME/.m2 as the path, where $HOME is your home directory.

That should get Lantern building successfully in Eclipse.

Building Installers

As of this writing, the Lantern installers are built using install4j. In addition, the installation scripts require an Exceptional license. If you want to build installers using the (deb|osx|win)Install*.bash scripts, you need to obtain a license of these programs. Note that this is not required in order to build and run Lantern from source.

The scripts that build the installers expect the described files in the corresponding paths relative to the lantern base folder:

# Exceptional license key.
./lantern_getexceptional.txt
# Windows install4j license certificate.
../secure/bns_cert.p12
# OS X install4j license certificate.
../secure/bns-osx-cert-developer-id-application.p12

In addition, install4jc expects the following variables defined in the environment:

INSTALL4J_KEY
INSTALL4J_MAC_PASS
INSTALL4J_WIN_PASS

If you're building installers on Ubuntu, don't use the system's JRE as installed via apt; it has a bunch of symlinks which get broken. Use a stand-alone JRE package

Building the compressed GeoIp database

java -cp [path-to-lantern-jar] org.lantern.geoip.GeoIpCompressorRunner compress [path-to-GeoLiteCity-csv] src/main/resources/org/lantern/geoip/geoip.db

Further Reading

You can also access JavaDocs and automatically generated reports on the Lantern codebase at the following:

Acknowledgements

The Lantern team is very grateful for the support from a number of software vendors. We would particularly like to acknowledge the great support from YourKit, who provides us with their excellent profiler. Check it out at http://www.yourkit.com/java/profiler/index.jsp!