My One-Click Mojaloop Deployment

A guide for a Mojaloop Deployment using Terraform, GKS, K8s, Helm and Make

Update August 2020: This post is over a year old now, and while still good as a reference piece, you should check my latest (more supported) super simple Mojaloop deployment: Mini-loop

I’ve been wanting to start making contributions to the Mojaloop project after attending the Mojaloop bootcamp earlier this year.

Since I don’t have the funds to leave instances running around the clock, I thought I’d make a simple tool for automating the deployment and configuration of a Mojaloop environment on Google Kubernetes Engine.

Why GKS?

The answer is quite simple really — I accidentally paid them $150 in advance (instead of $15), and hence have money to burn with Google. I actually already ran through a manual version of this demo using Digital Ocean’s managed Kubernetes service, and found the steps to be mostly the same.

Also, Amazon charges for their managed Kubernetes service, and Google does not.

Initial Setup

Before we get to the make commands, there's a few things you will need to set up first on your local machine.

I’m using macOS, so this guide will be tailored for my environment, but if you want to contribute instructions for Windows or Linux, feel free to help out in the comments below.

You will need to install the following things before this step. I’ll leave that up to you to figure out.

- brew
- make
- node
- git

Let’s start by installing terraform and the kubernetes cli:

# install terraform + kubernetes cli
brew install terraform
brew install kubernetes-cli
brew install kubernetes-helm

Google Cloud Config

Then set up a new project in Google Cloud Console. I called mine moja-box. Then download the service.json file. I followed this guide to help me set up the correct access key.

• Create a new service account key default@moja-box.iam.gserviceaccount.com Role: Project/Editor
• Click “Create”
• Save the .json file to ./config/default.json
• run echo 'default.json' > ./config/.gitignore to make sure we don't add accidentally this to git.

Google Cloud Local

#Install `GCloud` and setup
brew tap caskroom/cask
brew cask install google-cloud-sdk
gcloud components update
gcloud auth application-default login
#set the region - I chose asia-southeast1-a as it's close to me
gcloud config set compute/location asia-southeast1-a
gcloud config set project moja-box #or your project name

The configuration

To install the Terraform configuration and makefiles, check out my moja-box repo:

git clone https://github.com/vessels-tech/moja-box.git

Shout out to https://github.com/daaain/terraform-kubernetes-on-gcp/ , where I got the initial Terraform configuration for the Kubernetes cluster.

Then we need to configure the terraform secrets:

cp ./terraform/secrets.auto.tfvars.example ./terraform/secrets.auto.tfvars

Edit this file to your desired username and password. Keep in mind that the password must be at least 16 digits long.

Then run make deploy-infra to perform a dry run with Terraform and verify the config before actually spinning up the Kubernetes cluster.

Terraform, Kubernetes and Mojaloop:

Once all this configuration is set up, it’s as easy as running:

make deploy-infra-apply

To deploy the kubernetes infrastructure, and

make deploy-kube

This will then download the kubernetes config to your local machine, set up Helm and install the following charts:

• mojaloop
• nginx ingress
• kubernetes dashboard

Note: I wouldn’t recommend these settings for a production system, this is really just for testing only. There are a few key security shortcuts we took, such as deploying the kubernetes-dashboard in insecure mode.

Finally, run make print-hosts-settings to show how you can configure your /etc/hosts file to allow you to talk to the mojaloop deployment.

$ make print-host-settings
#Make sure your /etc/hosts contains the following:
#
#  <cluster_ip>	interop-switch.local central-kms.local forensic-logging-sidecar.local #central-ledger.local central-end-user-registry.local central-directory.local #central-hub.local central-settlement.local ml-api-adapter.local

After waiting a 5–10 minutes, the dashboard should be running. In a separate shell, run:

make proxy-kube-dash

and follow the printed link to log into the dashboard. You should see something similar to this:

Kubernetes Dashboard with Mojaloop half-running

After a few more minutes, everything should start to turn green, and Mojaloop will be available:

The dashboard with all services running!

You can now check that everything is up and running using curl:

curl -H Host:'central-directory.local' <cluster_ip_address>/health
#eg
curl -H Host:'central-directory.local' http://35.247.170.113/health
#should print {"status":"OK"}

You can also go to http://central-directory.local in your browser if your /etc/hosts file is set up correctly.

Mojaloop Config:

Once the mojaloop deployment is up and running, we can run a bunch of curl commands to configure the settlement accounts and demo DFSPs.

First we should set up the environment variables. copy ./config/mojaloop.private.example.sh to ./config/mojaloop.private.sh, and edit the fields there.

Next, edit the variables in ./config/mojaloop.public.sh.

Next, run the following:

make config-all

This will run through the scripts in the ./mojaloop_config directory, and set up the required Settlement accounts and DFSPs.

Test Transfer

Now that our DFSPs are set up, we can initiate a test transfer. Just run:

make example-create-transfer

and should everything be configured correctly, the bash script will create a transfer, accept it, and then print out the payer position.

Running the example-create-transfer command

You promised me one click!

Now that this is all configured, you can now run:

make deploy-infra-destroy

To tear down the entire deployment (don’t worry, it will ask for confirmation first.)

And to redeploy the whole environment, you can run:

make deploy
#wait for deployment and mojaloop to be up and running
make config-all

It’s that easy!

If you enjoyed this post, or have any suggestions or questions, let me know in the comments. If you liked this post, give it a ❤️ or a 👏, or whatever you crazy cats are calling it nowadays.