Nimbus: an Ethereum 2.0 Sharding Client for Resource-Restricted Devices

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Rationale

Nimbus: an Ethereum 2.0 Sharding Client. The code in this repository is currently focusing on Ethereum 1.0 feature parity, while all 2.0 research and development is happening in parallel in nim-beacon-chain. The two repositories are expected to merge in Q1 2019.

Development Updates

To keep up to date with changes and development progress, follow the Nimbus blog.

Building & Testing

Prerequisites

• A recent version of Facebook's RocksDB

  • Compile from source or use the package manager of your OS; for example, Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora have working RocksDB packages
  • on Windows, you can download pre-compiled DLLs

• GNU make, Bash and the usual POSIX utilities

Obtaining the prerequisites through the Nix package manager

Users of the Nix package manager can install all prerequisites simply by running:

nix-shell nimbus.nix

Build & Develop

POSIX-compatible OS

To build Nimbus (in "build/nimbus"), just execute:

make

Running ./build/nimbus --help will provide you with a list of the available command-line options. To start syncing with mainnet, just execute ./build/nimbus without any parameters.

To execute all tests:

make test

To pull the latest changes in all the Git repositories involved:

make update

To run a command that might use binaries from the Status Nim fork:

./env.sh vim

Our Wiki provides additional helpful information for debugging individual test cases and for pairing Nimbus with a locally running copy of Geth.

Windows

Install Mingw-w64 for your architecture using the "MinGW-W64 Online Installer" (first link under the directory listing). Run it and select your architecture in the setup menu ("i686" on 32-bit, "x86_64" on 64-bit), set the threads to "win32" and the exceptions to "dwarf" on 32-bit and "seh" on 64-bit. Change the installation directory to "C:\mingw-w64" and add it to your system PATH in "My Computer"/"This PC" -> Properties -> Advanced system settings -> Environment Variables -> Path -> Edit -> New -> C:\mingw-w64\mingw64\bin (it's "C:\mingw-w64\mingw32\bin" on 32-bit)

Install Git for Windows and use a "Git Bash" shell to clone and build Nimbus.

If you don't want to compile RocksDB and SQLite separately, you can fetch pre-compiled DLLs with:

mingw32-make fetch-dlls

This will place the right DLLs for your architecture in the "build/" directory.

You can now follow those instructions in the previous section by replacing make with mingw32-make (regardless of your 32-bit or 64-bit architecture).

Development tips

• you can switch the DB backend with a Nim compiler define: -d:nimbus_db_backend=... where the (case-insensitive) value is one of "rocksdb" (the default), "sqlite", "lmdb".

Troubleshooting

Report any errors you encounter, please, if not already documented!

Sometimes, the build will fail even though the latest CI is green - here are a few tips to handle this:

Using the Makefile

• Turn it off and on again:

make clean update

Using Nimble directly

• Wrong Nim version
  • We depend on many bleeding-edge features - Nim regressions often happen
  • Use the Status fork of Nim
• Wrong versions of dependencies
  • nimble dependency tracking often breaks due to its global registry
  • wipe the nimble folder and try again
• C compile or link fails
  • Nim compile cache is pretty buggy and sometimes will fail to recompile
  • wipe your nimcache folder

License

Licensed and distributed under either of

• MIT license: LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

or

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHEv2 or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

at your option. This file may not be copied, modified, or distributed except according to those terms.