In this lab, we'll take a look Aries Bifold, a complete, open source Aries mobile wallet that you or your organization can deploy today.
In this lab we’ll just take you to a couple of places that provide getting started details for using Aries Bifold and you can decide which you want to follow. In both cases, you will need to install (if necessary) an Android simulator. iOS development and testing is of course, but requires a Mac and more setup, hence the "Android first" approach.
We have two suggestions for setting up a getting started development of an Aries Bifold mobile wallet--Aries Bifold itself, or an open source, downstream implementation of Aries Bifold, the BC Wallet. Your choice depends on what you want to get out of the exercise. Take a read through both sections and take your pick.
If you want to help the community (and build up your reputation!), we recommend creating a GitHub issue, or better, doing a pull request, noting corrections you find in the installation instructions based on your experience. You will be thanked!!
As well, feel free to post an issue or PR to the repo containing these labs with updates to the information here.
The installation instructions for running a development instance of Aries Bifold can be found here, in the repository's README. As things are changing fast with Aries Bifold, that should have the latest information, so we won't repeat the details here. The instructions as of last check (February, 2023) are not as complete as you will find with the BC Wallet, so it might be a bit tougher for those lacking mobile experience. On your first pass, we would recommend skipping the iOS steps.
There is also a video linked in the README that provides a demonstration of a user deploying an Aries Cloud Agent Python mediator and running an instance of Aries Bifold connecting to another Agent.
The installation instructions for running a development instance of BC Wallet can be found in the Developers Guide. BC Wallet is built on top of Aries Bifold, and the wallet's build process merges the code from the two repositories in building the apps. The vast majority of the code in the BC Wallet is from Aries Bifold, so though you are using the downstream BC Wallet, most of the capabilities are the same as in Aries Bifold itself. If you are planning on creating your own wallet, it is not a bad tactic to copy (not fork) the current state of the BC Wallet repository and then update that code to make it your own. Much of the code is configuration data and content specific to BC Gov that will be relatively easy to identify and update.
A reason for using the BC Wallet repository for this lab rather than using Aries Bifold directly is that of this writing (February 2023), the instructions for the BC Wallet go into more detail and so are easier to follow.
Since the lab does not have any specific guidance on what to do, the only takeaway is the experience gained as a developer in setting up to run an Aries mobile wallet. Aries Bifold is evolving rapidly due to its many contributors. If you are interested in creating your own spin on an Aries wallet, its a great place to get started.
That's it for this lab! Please return to the course.