This page explains how to setup a Peppol AP from scratch.
AP is the abbreviation for Access Point which is the technical endpoint for
sending and receiving business documents.
See the Dictionary for more abbreviations.
Since 2020-02-01 AS4 is the mandatory transport protocol in the Peppol eDelivery network.
There are a few known Open Source possibilities (I'm aware of) on how to build/run a Peppol AccessPoint (in alphabetical order).
-
Holodeck B2B is also a prebuild solution.
It is an Open Source project written in Java.
It supports AS4 and comes with commercial support.
Supports for Peppol dynamic discovery is not Open Source.
-
Oxalis is a prebuild solution.
It is an Open Source project written in Java.
It supports primarily Peppol specific AS4.
Especially the interoperability of the AS4 implementation is not good as they passed the
EC conformance test only partially.
-
The solution described in this document is phase4
as the AS4 communication channel for sending and receiving Peppol AS4 messages.
phase4 is a shared library for AS4 message exchange and can hence be used in versatile scenarios.
phase4 is already used by a huge amount of users around the globe - a few of them are listed at
https://github.com/phax/phase4/wiki/Known-Users.
Prerequisites
Before you can start you need to have the following information in place:
- As the very first step you need to sign the Peppol agreements (previously called TIAs - Transport Infrastructure Agreements) with
your Peppol Authority OpenPeppol AISBL.
- Afterwards you need to apply for an AP certificate at OpenPeppol.
This certificate is required to run the AP.
- At least one of the default Peppol BIS (processes) must be implemented.
A list of
all available BISs
is available on the Peppol website.
- You should have a look at the
official Peppol AS4 profile.
- You should have a look at the
official Peppol Envelope specification
(SBDH).
- You should be familiar with Java
- Basic knowledge about Apache Tomcat (and optionally a reverse proxy) should be present
AS4 as a transport protocol (mandatory)
The Peppol AS4 profile
is based on the
CEF eDelivery AS4 1.14 profile
which in turn is a (non-perfect) profile of the
OASIS AS4 profile v1.0
which (you guessed it) is a profile of the
OASIS ebXML Messaging V3.
AS4 Message structure
Peppol adds specific limitations on the usage of AS4.
AS4 Messages MUST be signed and encrypted.
AS4 messages MUST have exactly one encrypted payload which MUST be a Standard Business Document (SBD).
Peppol AS4 message MUST use the MIME encoding for message transmission.
AS4 AccessPoint receiver
See the official phase4 documentation on phase4-peppol-servlet for details.
AS4 AccessPoint sender
See the official phase4 documentation on phase4-peppol-client for details.
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