Plugging it in

Last updated on 2025-10-30 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 10 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • How do we use a signature file?
  • Should I use DROID or Siegfried?

Objectives

  • Be able to use a signature file with your preferred tool.

Plugging it in – the easy way!

Once you have created a signature file you will want to plug it into your preferred tool to test it against your files.

For this workshop we have developed a method of doing this through your web-browser using Siegfried.

Testimonial

Roy!

Roy is a Siegfried companion tool and it enables us to compile signatures alongside an existing DROID signature file. Siegfried then allows us to run those signatures against our files.

Visit ffdev.info to get access to an browser-based version of Roy, and Siegfried for this next step!

Callout

WASM

This online version of Roy, and Siegfried uses Web Assembly (WASM) which means everything is loaded locally in your browser. With Siegfried running locally in your browser data is not transferred over the network to any other computer, it is sandboxed and kept local to your machine.

  1. Go to ffdev.info and look at the Siegfried tab.
  2. Select “roy: load signature’ and navigate to a signature file on your hard disk. The signature file will be loaded into memory alongside Siegfried’s default signature.
  3. Now click “Siegfried: File ID” and select your test files (or signature file) and click okay.
  4. Siegfried will attempt to identify your file and should display a result matching your signature file’s metadata.
  5. Congratulations, you’ve managed to create your first signature file and successfully identified your files using Siegfried.

Trainers can skip or summarize the next section which runs through doing the same locally, i.e. for a locally installed DROID or Siegfried.

Doing it locally

You may want to avail yourself on how to do this using your local tools. We go into this in detail below for DROID and Siegfried.

Prerequisite
  • the following assumes that you have either DROID or Siegfried installed locally.
  • the instructions assume some familiarity with running both tools and getting forrmat identifications out of them.

DROID

  1. With DROID installed you will find its configuration folder in %userprofile%/.droid6/ on Windows and ~/.droid6 on Linux and Mac.
  2. Signature files are stored in a folder called signature_files.
  3. Given your signature file created above, copy and paste it into this directory.
Callout

Naming conventions

At time of writing there are no known limitations on the filename you use here.

  1. Once you have done this, launch DROID locally as you would normally.
  2. Once DROID has loaded, navigate to tools -> preferences.
  3. From the binary signatures drop-down look for your signature filename (it will be minus the xml suffix).
  4. Click ok to accept the changes.
  5. While DROID opens a profile when it first loads, your new signature file is not yet loaded into memory and so will not function in the currently open profile.
  6. Open a new profile by pressing ‘New’ it should open as Untitled-2 if you have no other existing profiles.
  7. You can now add files using ‘Add’ and attempt to identify these files against your new signature file.
  8. You can read more in the DROID user guide.

Siegfried

  1. Run sf -update to ensure that a siegfried configuration folder has been created.
  2. Attempt to run roy build -nocontainer -noreports. If this fails, download the latest DROID signature file into the folder described in the error message by roy, e.g. %userprofile%/siegfried/ on Windows or ~/.local/share/siegfried/ on Linux (configurations may vary).
  3. You can download the latest signature file from The National Archives: DROID signature files.
Callout

Keeping it simple

Because it gets more complicated and this method allows us to test out signatures we’re focusing on building a signature file using just the DROID signature file here but it is possible to build a more comprehensive signature with roy using a PRONOM download by using ./roy harvest and then by downloading the most recent container file to the same siegfried folder above. See the siegfried documentation for more information on building signatures.

  1. Once you have verified you can build a signature with roy, you need to add your own signature file to the collection, you can do this as follows: ./roy build -extend </path/to/your/signature/file.xml>.
  2. Given no errors you can now run siegfried against your own files and they should identify against your new signature file!
  3. For more information on building signatures with siegfried and roy, check out siegfried’s wiki: roy: inspect and debug.


Key Points
  • You can use any tool!
  • There are different merits to each.