Spinning up a local network

Prerequisites

Namada must be installed from source in order to run a local network.

There is a script that has been written specifically for this purpose, which can be found under scripts in the namada repository.

Installing script dependencies

The script has some dependencies that must be installed in order to run it successfully:

  1. trash must be installed.
  2. python3 must be installed.
  3. toml Python pip library https://pypi.org/project/toml/ must be installed.

trash can be installed via:

# Linux
sudo apt install trash-cli

# MacOS
brew install trash

The script will require a genesis configuration file, which is a TOML file that specifies the parameters of the network. Examples of such files can be found in the anoma-network-config repo in the templates directory.

Modifying the genesis configuration file

In order to run the script sucessfully, all sections of validators must be removed from the toml file. This is because the script will generate a new set of validators for the network.

The below image shows an example of a genesis configuration file that has been modified to remove the validators section.

editing genesis config steps

Building wasm

The script will also require all wasm files for txs to be built. This can be done by running the following command (whilst in the namada directory):

make build-wasm-scripts

Running the script

The script is called build_network.sh and can be run with the following command:

./scripts/build_network.sh <config_toml> <base_dir> <namada_dir>

More specifically, the script takes three arguments:

  1. config_toml: the path to the (validator-free) genesis configuration file.
  2. base_dir: the path to the BASE_DIR directory, where all chain-data is stored. For linux, this is usually $HOME/.local/share/namada, and for MacOS, this is usually "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Namada".
  3. namada_dir: the path to the namada BINARIES directory. If the binaries were build using make build-release this would imply the namada/target/release directory.

For example, a MacOS user would run something along the lines of:

./scripts/build_network.sh ~/anoma-network-config/templates/edited_genesis_config.toml "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Namada" ./target/release

Running the ledger

After the script has been run, a python process will have started in the background. The ledger can be run through the familiar command:

target/release/namada ledger

Cleaning up

After the local network has fulfilled its purpose, it can be cleaned up by running the following commands found in the cleanup function of the script:

    pkill -f ".hack/chains"
    rm -r .hack/chains
    rm local.*.tar.gz