OpenCerts New Documentation

March 13, 2020

🎉 Welcome to the brand new OpenCerts documentation 🎉

Documentation organisation

We have worked on revamping the documentation to make a clear distinction between OpenAttestation documentation and OpenCerts documentation.

One might be confuse to understand the difference between OpenAttestation and OpenCerts:

OpenAttestation is a standard that helps to create Verifiable Document.
OpenCerts is a specific implementation, using OpenAttestation, whose purpose is to provide universities a way to create Verifiable Certificates.

In OpenCerts documentation we will then focus only on what's specific to OpenCerts:

What happened in OpenCerts recently?

While we were working on the documentation, we also created many components that might be useful for OpenCerts integrators:

OpenAttestation CLI

We worked on OpenAttestation CLI to add a new option when wrapping documents. This option allow you to specify a URL to a custom schema to ensure the validity of the document you wrap. Read more in the documentation.

There are 2 differences between OpenCerts CLI and OpenAttestation CLI:

OpenAttestation CLI force you to use documentStore instead of certificateStore (don't worry they are strictly equivalent).
OpenAttestation CLI force you to provide identityProof using DNS-TXT record.

We strongly recommend and encourage to use OpenAttestation CLI in the future. OpenCerts CLI will be deprecated.

OpenCerts verifier

OpenCerts identity verification is based on a registry maintained by SSG. Because of this, OpenCerts identity verification is not compatible with OpenAttestation identity verification.

To overcome this problem, we built a javascript library @govtechsg/opencerts-verify that check the identity over OpenCerts registry and over DNS-TXT record. Read more in the documentation.

OpenCerts verify API

Sometimes during development you might need to make sure a certificate that you generated is valid. While you could use dev.opencerts.io to assert the validity of the certificate, the process is hard to automate and tedious.

To help you on this, we published an API that you might use to validate certificate using HTTP call. Read more in the documentation

This API does not provide any guarantee for production purposes. We might work on providing a terraform module that you could use to deploy the API on your own infrastructure.

Live transcripts

For universities that might want to provide live transcripts to their students, we wrote documentation on how they can make use of OpenAttestation Status API. The documentation is just an implementation suggestion and does not mean you MUST follow it. Read more in the documentation

Community

In order to facilitate the communication with the tech team, we created a Spectrum community. Feel free to reach us out there if you have any question about OpenCerts.