Verifying Release Artifacts

This page provides some help for anyone who wants to verify release candidate artifacts so they feel they can genuinely vote on the related vote thread on the dev list. It is not intended to be exhaustive instructions. It’s a list of things people have generally found to be useful to do when checking the artifacts.

It is essential that the signatures and hashsums are good. Please do read Verifying Apache HTTP Server Releases for information on why you should verify releases..

These instructions have been rolled up into a script, which you can run instead. Cut and paste the following:

wget --no-check-certificate https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/aries/scripts/verify_staged_release.sh
chmod a+x verify_staged_release.sh
./verify_staged_release.sh [RELEASE-NUM] mytempdirectory 2>&1 | tee verifyresults.txt
grep FAIL verifyresults.txt
grep ERROR verifyresults.txt

Have I got the KEYS?

To verify Aries release artifacts you need the public keys for the Aries committers. The master KEYS file is in Subversion. The easiest way of getting it from the command line is to non-recursively check-out the files in the top level of the Aries location using:

svn checkout -N https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/aries

You then need to import the keys into PGP:

gpg --import KEYS

Download artifacts

For each 'useful' file there are several others created to help you determine whether it’s genuine. The PGP signature .asc file shows who created the 'useful' file. Then there are checksum files (.md5 and .sha1) for both the 'useful' file and the .asc file. To download the content for the repository you’re verifying try this:

wget -e robots=off --no-check-certificate -np -r -nH https://repository.apache.org/content/repositories/orgapachearies-xxx/org/apache/aries/

where xxx is the number of the repository you’re verifying.

wget will download the files into a directory called content. The following use of the 'find' command assumes the downloads are in the 'content' directory.

Verify the artifacts

Ensure the checksums are right for the released files. Copy/paste this into the command line:

for i in `find content -type f | egrep -v '.md5$|.sha1$|index.html|maven-metadata.xml'`
do
    mymd5=`md5sum $i|cut -c1-32`
    repomd5=`cat $i.md5`
    if [ "$mymd5" == "$repomd5" ]
    then
        echo "GOOD MD5 for $i"
    else
        echo "*BAD MD5 for $i *****"
    fi
done

(On the Mac, use md5 -q instead of md5sum and the cut.)

Do something similar for sha1:

for i in `find content -type f | egrep -v '.md5$|.sha1$|index.html|maven-metadata.xml'`
do
    mysha1=`sha1sum $i|cut -c1-40`
    reposha1=`cat $i.sha1`
    if [ "$mysha1" == "$reposha1" ]
    then
        echo "GOOD SHA1 for $i"
    else
        echo "*BAD SHA1 for $i *****"
    fi
done

(On the Mac, use openssl sha1 instead of sha1sum.)

Ensure the PGP signature files are good. See the Validating section of Verifying Apache HTTP Server Releases for background on validating the authenticity of a key.

for i in `find content -type f | egrep '.asc$'`
do
    gpg $i
done

You shouldn’t get any errors.

Build the code

It’s a good idea to check the source release zip builds. Unzip it first:

find . -name *-source-release.zip |xargs -n 1 unzip

Go into each subdir created and run:

mvn clean install

RAT check

It’s also a good idea to run the Apache RAT (Release Audit Tool). The Aries POMs are set up so you can do:

mvn -fn -Prat

currently RAT fails due to the generated DEPENDENCIES file not containing a license. It’s safe to ignore this as the file is generated. So in order to ensure RAT checks all subdirectories, use the -fn. Then check any failures with

find . -name \*.rat | xargs grep \!\?\?