localnet

README

localnet

localnet is a FAST binary tool that quickly and easily, sets up a local network on the users computer. The network will stay standing till the program is closed.

Example

localnet -shell

Building

The localnet tool expects that you can already build venus. Please refer to the README in the root of this project for details.

localnet is only compatible with venus binaries built from the same git ref.

go build -o localnet main.go

Usage

Usage of ./localnet:
  -binpath venus
    	set the binary used when executing venus commands
  -blocktime duration
    	duration for blocktime (default 5s)
  -miner-collateral string
    	amount of fil each miner will use for collateral (default "500")
  -miner-count int
    	number of miners (default 5)
  -miner-expiry string
    	expiry value used when creating ask for miners (default "86400")
  -miner-price string
    	price value used when creating ask for miners (default "0.0000000010")
  -shell
    	setup a filecoin client node and enter into a shell ready to use
  -small-sectors
    	enables small sectors (default true)
  -workdir string
    	set the working directory used to store filecoin repos

Addional notes from the author

The default settings are pretty close to what the devnets run. The tool defaults to small sectors, but that can be changed by passing -small-sectors=false. To make it a bit easier to use, there is also a -shell flag that can be passed which will drop the user into a shell with a venus daemon already running and ready to be used with venus.

Note: Using regular sized sectors with localnet can be incredibly taxing on a system and should probably be avoided on laptops due to the number of miners running. The overall miner count can be reduced from the default 5 by passing the -miner-count flag.

localnet $ ./localnet -small-sectors=false -shell

I ran ./localnet -small-sectors=false -miner-count=2 on my laptop ( i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz / 16GB Ram) and it took just under 40 minutes, the equivalent with small sectors took 2 minutes.

A few helpful things to note when working with localnet

1. All nodes and filecoin repositories will be cleaned up if the program exits. The program will not exit till it receives a SIGTERM (ctrl-c)
2. Every command that is ran will be printed to the output, along with which node ran it. The nodes repository is also printed first.
   • 08:51:48.014 INFO /tmp/local: RunCmd: /tmp/localnet417209521/0 [go-filecoin ...
3. The stdout and stderr are written to disk under the repository directory
   • stderr /tmp/localnet417209521/0/daemon.stderr
   • stdout /tmp/localnet417209521/0/daemon.stdout
4. The localnet tool will copy the venus binary specifed by binpath and place it in a bin directory under each nodes repository which is used to execute all commands. To ensure binary compatibility, it's best to execute this same binary
5. You can run commands against any of the nodes by using the -repodir flag with the venus binary
   • /tmp/localnet417209521/0/bin/go-filecoin -repodir=/tmp/localnet417209521/0 id