RavKav Online for Linux (unofficial packaging effort)

This is unofficial - not related in any way to the ravkavonline site, or to pcentra.

About

ravkavoline is a service that allows you to charge up your RavKav (Israeli public transport smartcard) from home, with the use of a smartcard reader.

While their solution is standard based (java, websockets, pcsc), for some reason they only published windows and Mac OS executables.

For now this repo has the ArchLinux PKGBUILD to extarct the JAR file from the mac installation zip and install it. Adapting to other distributions should be easy, as is creating a 'GNU Make' based installation. Contributions are welcome.

Installation

Install the PKGBUILD as you would any other PKGBUILD.

Then, enable the pcscd socket:

systemctl enable --now pcscd.socket

Insert the card to the card reader, and go to https://www.ravkavonline.co.il/

Everything should work.

Details

• The reason we need the desktop file, is to register a mimetype for the 'ravkav:' uri scheme. The ravkav website opens a websocket connection to the application by requesting a url of the form ravkav:wss://proxy.ravkavonline.co.il/SOMEID.

• An alternative to this approach, would be to put the .desktop file in $HOME/.local/share/applications/, and to run update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications. This would register the mime for this user only, instead of using the global location. You can modify the Exec line, to run the jar instead of the shell script, and so with only two files (.jar and .desktop) you can use RavKavOnline.