If you have an existing installation, complete applicable Migrations before proceeding.

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TrueBlocks / Unchained Index

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Installing
• Command line
• Chifra Serve
• Troubleshooting
• The unchained index
• Docker version
• Documentation
• Linting
• Contributing
• Contact
• List of Contributors

Introduction

TrueBlocks improves access to blockchain data for any EVM-compatible chain (particularly Ethereum mainnet) while remaining entirely local.

Features:

• chifra init and chifra scrape which builds the Unchained Index, an index of address appearances that provides lightning-fast access to transactional histories,

• An optional binary cache, which speeds up queries to the RPC by orders of magnitude,

• Enhanced command-line options enabling much better access to chain data for data scientists and analysts. For example, easily extract all logs produced by a smart contract or view all ERC-20 holdings for an account, etc.,

• Advanced tools for producing reconciled "bank statements" and accounting export for any token including ETH.

• An infinite number of other things restricted only by your imagination.

Installing

Please see the installation instructions on our website.

Searching account histories

While optional, you most likely want to use the Unchained Index to search account histories. To do so, get the index.

Account explorer

You may use the command line, of course, to access data, but you may also wish to run an API server:

chifra daemon

Use curl to pull data or use it to drive our "pre-beta" Account Explorer. See installing the explorer. The API provides the identical tools and options as the command line and it documented here.

Generate gRPC files (developers only)

To regenerate gRPC files, you have to install protobuf tools:

brew install protobuf # Mac
go install google.golang.org/protobuf/cmd/protoc-gen-go@v1.28
go install google.golang.org/grpc/cmd/protoc-gen-go-grpc@v1.2

Command line

The TrueBlocks command-line tool is called chifra. This gives you access to all the other tools:

chifra --help

Get more help on any sub-command with chifra <cmd> --help. Full documentation is available on our website.

Chifra Serve

One of chifra's command line tools is called serve. This tool provides a simple API mimicing the command line. It is intended to be used only for single user enviroments.

To start the server, run:

chifra server

Chifra was built for the command line, a fact we purposefully take advantage of to ensure continued operation on small machines. As such, this tool is not intended to serve multiple end users in a cloud-based server environment. This is by design. Be forewarned.

Get more help on any sub-command with chifra <cmd> --help. Full documentation is available on our website.

Getting data

Let's look at the first subcommand, called status.

chifra status

If you get a bunch of data, congratulations, your installation is working. Try this command which shows every 10th block between the first and the 100,000th:

chifra blocks 0-100000:10

You should see a long stream of data. Kill the display with Control+C.

See the entire list of chifra commands with chifra --help.

Troubleshooting

Depending on your setup, you may get the following error message when you run some chifra commands:

  Warning: A request to your Ethereum node (http://localhost:8545)
  resulted in the following error [Could not connect to server].
  Specify a valid rpcProvider by editing $rootPath/trueblocks.toml.

Edit the file as instructed. You may find helpful answers on our FAQ.

See our blog for a lot of useful articles on getting started and using TrueBlocks.

If you continue to have trouble, join our discord discussion

The unchained index

The primary data structure produced by TrueBlocks is an index of address appearances called the Unchained Index. This index provides very quick access to transaction histories for any address.

You may either build the entire index from scratch (requires an EVM-compatible tracing/archive node) or you may download a snapshot of the index build from there.

This process is described in the article Indexing Addresses.

Docker version

Our official docker version is in a separate repo. Please see that repo for more information on running with Docker.

Documentation

The TrueBlocks documentation repo builds the TrueBlocks website. See our website for the best available documentation.

Linting

Our build process requires the code you submit to be linted.

In order to that, you must install the GoLang linters. See this page for more information.

To install the primary linter (called golangci-lint), run this command:

curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/golangci/golangci-lint/master/install.sh | sh -s -- -b $(go env GOPATH)/bin v1.53.3

Verify the installation with golangci-lint --version. You should see something like this:

golangci-lint has version 1.50.1 built from <commit> on <date>

Next, run golangci-lint linters. Your system should have at least the default list to properly lint your submission.

> golangci-lint linters

You are encouraged to use additional linters. If you do, and you think they're useful, please suggest that we add it to our build process.

Contributing

A chart showing the number of stars on our repo over time.

We love contributors. Please see information about our workflow before proceeding.

1. Fork this repository into your own repo.
2. Create a branch: git checkout -b <branch_name>.
3. Make changes to your local branch and commit them to your forked repo: git commit -m '<commit_message>'
4. Push back to the original branch: git push origin TrueBlocks/trueblocks-core
5. Create the pull request.

Contact

If you have questions, comments, or complaints, please join the discussion on our discord server which is linked from our website.

List of Contributors

Thanks to the following people who have contributed to this project:

• @tjayrush
• @dszlachta
• @wildmolasses
• @MysticRyuujin
• @MattDodsonEnglish
• @crodnun