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

Join the Status community chats:

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"

• the Premix debugging tools are documented separately

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