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Fluffy: The Nimbus Portal Network Client

Introduction

This folder holds the development of the Nimbus client implementation supporting the Portal Network: fluffy. The Portal Network is a project still heavily in research phase and fully in flux. This client is thus still highly experimental.

Current status of specifications can be found in the portal-network-specs repository.

Development Updates

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

Monthly development updates are shared here.

How to Build & Run

Prerequisites

GNU Make, Bash and the usual POSIX utilities. Git 2.9.4 or newer.

Build fluffy client

git clone git@github.com:status-im/nimbus-eth1.git
cd nimbus-eth1
make fluffy

# See available command line options
./build/fluffy --help

# Example command: Run the client and connect to a bootstrap node.
./build/fluffy --bootstrap-node:enr:<base64 encoding of ENR>

Update and rebuild fluffy client

# From the nimbus-eth1 repository
git pull
# To bring the git submodules up to date
make update

make fluffy

Run fluffy on public testnet

There is a fleet of fluffy nodes deployed, and to easily join these, the --network:testnet0 option can be used.

./build/fluffy --network:testnet0 --table-ip-limit:1024 --bucket-ip-limit:24 --log-level:info --rpc

Note: This --network option will merely select a static set of specific bootstrap nodes belonging to a "testnet". Currently testnet0 is the only option, which results in connecting to the testnet bootstrap nodes. It should be noted that there is no real way to distinguish a "specific" Portal network, and as long as the same Portal protocols are supported, nodes can simply connect to it and no real separation can be made.

The table-ip-limit and bucket-ip-limit options are needed to allow more nodes with the same IPs in the routing tables. This is needed because the fleet of fluffy nodes runs on only 2 machines / network interfaces.

The network is currently storing only the first 25000 mainnet blocks. This can be tested by using the JSON-RPC call eth_getBlockByHash:

# Get the hash of a block from your favorite block explorer, e.g.:
# 0x8dda3a641653c0454569c3b5be529f58b14d2a5b5d87956664c746ce1e367c21
# Run command to get this block:
curl -s -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"1","method":"eth_getBlockByHash","params":["0x8dda3a641653c0454569c3b5be529f58b14d2a5b5d87956664c746ce1e367c21", false]}' http://localhost:8545 | jq

One can also use the blockwalk tool to walk down the blocks one by one, e.g:

make fluffy-tools

./build/blockwalk --block-hash:0xf6bfad56d1a45d1661506343dd1e511b5d7e17565b3ec293125ff0890b9709e5

Run fluffy test suite

# From the nimbus-eth1 repository
make fluffy-test

Run fluffy local testnet script

./fluffy/scripts/launch_local_testnet.sh

Find more details on the usage and workings of the local testnet script here.

Seeding history (=block) data into the Portal network

Set-up access to an Ethereum JSON-RPC endpoint (e.g. local geth instance) that can serve the data.
Use the eth-data-exporter tool to download history data through the JSON-RPC endpoint into the format which is suitable for reading data into Fluffy client and propagating into the network:

make fluffy-tools

./build/eth_data_exporter --initial-block:1 --end-block:10 --data-dir:"/user_data_dir/"

This will store blocks 1 to 10 into a json file located at ./user_data_dir/eth-history-data.json.

Note: Currently only hardcoded address ws://127.0.0.1:8546 works for the Ethereum JSON-RPC endpoint.

Run Fluffy and trigger the propagation of data with the portal_history_propagate JSON-RPC API call:

./build/fluffy --network:testnet0 --table-ip-limit:1024 --bucket-ip-limit:24 --log-level:info --rpc

# From another shell
curl -s -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"1","method":"portal_history_propagate","params":["./user_data_dir/eth-history-data.json"]}' http://localhost:8545 | jq

Windows support

Follow the steps outlined here to build fluffy on Windows.

Metrics and their visualisation

To enable metrics run Fluffy with the --metrics flag:

./build/fluffy --metrics

Default the metrics are available at http://127.0.0.1:8008/metrics.

The address can be changed with the --metrics-address and --metrics-port options.

This provides only a snapshot of the current metrics. In order track the metrics over time and to also visualise them one can use for example Prometheus and Grafana.

The steps on how to set up such system is explained in this guide.

A Fluffy specific dashboard can be found here.

This is the dashboard used for our Fluffy testnet fleet. In order to use it locally, you will have to remove the {job="nimbus-fluffy-metrics"} part from the instance and container variables queries in the dashboard settings. Or they can also be changed to a constant value.

The other option would be to remove those variables and remove their usage in each panel query.

For Developers

When working on this repository, you can run the env.sh script to run a command with the right environment variables set. This means the vendored Nim and Nim modules will be used, just as when you use make.

E.g.:

# start a new interactive shell with the right env vars set
./env.sh bash

More development tips can be found on the general nimbus-eth1 readme.

The code follows the Status Nim Style Guide.

Detailed document showing commands to test client protocol interoperability.

License

Licensed and distributed under either of

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

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

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

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