Setting up an identity

Tutorial 1 — Setting up an identity

Scenario: Alice Nguyen is a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She needs a certified identity so she can authenticate to internal APIs and eventually connect with collaborators at other institutions.

1. Create your identity

certified init 'Alice Nguyen' \
    --email alice.nguyen@ornl.gov \
    --config $HOME/etc/certified

This creates a config directory with a CA key, an identity cert, and self-trust entries so Alice can immediately call her own services. See Create an identity for all available options.

2. Inspect what was created

ls $HOME/etc/certified/
# CA.key  CA.crt  id.key  id.crt  known_servers/  known_clients/

Export the identity cert in base64-DER (for sharing with a signer):

certified get-ident --config $HOME/etc/certified

3. Run a quick self-test

Start a minimal echo server using your new identity:

certified serve --config $HOME/etc/certified examples.echo:app https://127.0.0.1:8443

Then call it from another terminal:

certified message --config $HOME/etc/certified https://127.0.0.1:8443/echo/hello

If the server responds, your certificate stack is working end-to-end.