CertAssist is a JavaScript interface to ca.mit.edu and ca.csail.mit.edu that lets you securely download and install your MIT or CSAIL personal certificate, even if ca.mit.edu and ca.csail.mit.edu do not support your browser. You can use it at https://certassist.mit.edu/.
The instructions below are for developers who want to make changes to CertAssist.
CertAssist builds with webpack, and therefore requires Node.js.
npm install
npm run build
The build process outputs index.html and its dependencies to the
dist directory.
The dist directory may be served to the web directly as static
content. On the same hostname, the /ws/mit and /ws/csail URLs must
point to WebSocket proxies connected to ca.mit.edu port 443 and
ca.csail.mit.edu port 1443, respectively. You can set up a quick
development server using
websockify (note that you can
only easily use one of these on a given local port):
websockify --web=dist localhost:8000 ca.mit.edu:443
websockify --web=dist localhost:8000 ca.csail.mit.edu:1443
The production server previously ran on Apache, using
mod_proxy_wstunnel to route /ws to a websockify daemon. Before
Apache 2.4.10, ProxyPass needs the disablereuse=On option (bug
55890). It now
runs on nginx, which seems to have fewer such bugs.