Frequency is a Polkadot parachain for data distribution protocols such as DSNP.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Prerequisites
  • Hardware
• Build
  • Local Desktop
    • asdf Support
  • Remote Instance such as AWS EC2
    • Ubuntu
• Run
  • 1. Collator Node without a Relay Chain
    • Manual Sealing
    • Instant Sealing
    • Interval Sealing
  • 2. Collator Node with Local Relay Chain
    • Mixed Terminal/Docker
      • Stop and Clean Environment
    • All in Docker Container
  • Run Tests
    • E2E Tests
  • Run Benchmarks
  • Run with offchain features
• Format, Lint and Audit Source Code
• Runtime
  • Verify Runtime
  • Local Runtime Upgrade
    • Local Relay Chain
    • Standalone Chain (No Relay)
• Contributing
• Security Issue Reporting
• Additional Resources
• Miscellaneous

Prerequisites

1. Docker Engine*
2. Docker Compose

---

• For Mac users, Docker Desktop engine also installs docker compose environment, so no need to install it separately.

Hardware

Benchmarks are run on an AWS c6i.4xlarge and recommend collators have generally the same reference hardware specified by Parity for Validators.

Non-Collator nodes may have less power, but low memory configurations may lead to out of memory errors.

Build

Local Desktop

1. Install Rust using the official instructions.

2. Check out this repository

3. rust-toolchain.toml specifies the standard toolchain to use. If you have rustup installed, it will automatically install the correct toolchain when you run any cargo command.

4. Running make check will run cargo checks for all Frequency features. This is the recommended way to check your code before committing. Alternatively, you can run following for specific features:

   make check-no-relay
   make check-local
   make check-testnet
   make check-mainnet

5. Build Wasm and native code.

   Note, if you get errors complaining about missing dependencies (protobuf, cmake, yarn, node, jq, etc.) install them with your favorite package manager(e.g. Homebrew on macOS) and re-run the command again.

   rustup update
   cargo clean
   make build

   Above will build Frequency with all features. Alternatively you may run following command to build with specific features:

   make build-no-relay
   make build-local
   make build-testnet
   make build-mainnet

   To build local, rococo/paseo (testnet) or mainnet features respectively.

At this point you should have ./target/debug directory generated locally with compiled project files. (or ./target/release for make build-*-release)

asdf Support

Frequency optionally supports asdf for managing dependencies of the following tools: Install the required plugins for asdf: Please note that if you use rustup, asdf may conflict and cause issues. It is recommended to use one or the other, but not both for rust.

asdf plugin-add rust
asdf plugin-add make
asdf plugin-add cmake https://github.com/srivathsanmurali/asdf-cmake.git

Install the dependency versions declared in .tool-versions

asdf install

NOTE: asdf does not support clang and it needs to be installed separately.

Remote Instance such as AWS EC2

For remote instances running Linux, if you want to check out and build such as on an AWS EC2 instance, the process is slightly different to what is in the Substrate documentation.

Ubuntu

1. Upgrade the instance and install missing packages with apt:

sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt upgrade git
sudo apt install —-assume-yes build-essential
sudo apt install --assume-yes clang curl libssl-dev cmake

2. Follow official instructions to install Rust, but select 3. customize the installation, then reply n to Modify PATH variable? (Y/n)
3. Follow steps 6-10 at Substrate: Linux development
4. Proceed with checking out and building Frequency as above.

Run

There are 2 options to run the chain locally:

Note, Running Frequency via following options does not require binary to be built or chain specs to be generated separately, and is programmed within the scripts for simplicity.

1. Collator Node without a relay chain (in manual/instant/interval sealing mode)
2. Collator Node with a local relay chain

1. Collator Node without a Relay Chain

This option runs just one collator node without the need for a relay chain.

Manual Sealing

a. Blocks can be triggered by calling the engine_createBlock RPC

curl http://localhost:9944 -H "Content-Type:application/json;charset=utf-8" -d   '{ \
    "jsonrpc":"2.0", \
    "id":1, \
    "method":"engine_createBlock", \
    "params": [true, true] \
    }'

b. Use the "start-manual" make target to call the RPC Great for testing multiple items in the same block or other block formation tests.

make start-manual

Instant Sealing

Same as Manual Sealing, but will also automatically trigger the formation of a block whenever a transaction is added to the validated transaction pool. Great for most testing.

make start

Also available as a Docker image: frequencychain/instant-seal-node

docker run --rm -p 9944:9944 -p 30333:30333 frequencychain/instant-seal-node

To stop running chain hit [Ctrl+C] in terminal where the chain was started.

Node	Ports	Explorer URL
Frequency Collator Node	ws and rpc:9944, p2p:30333	127.0.0.1:9944

Interval Sealing

This sealing mode will automatically trigger the formation of a block at a specified interval (default is every 12 seconds.)

make start-interval

2. Collator Node with Local Relay Chain

Mixed Terminal/Docker

This option runs one collator node as local host process and two relay chain validator nodes in each own docker container.

1. Start relay chain validator nodes.

   make start-relay

2. Register a new parachain slot (parachain id) for Frequency. Note, if parachain was previously registered on a running relay chain and no new registration is required, then you can skip the above step.

   make register

3. Start Frequency as parachain. This step will generate genesis/wasm and start the parachain collator.

   make start-frequency

4. Onboard Frequency to the relay chain

   make onboard

Stop and Clean Environment

1. Off-board Frequency from relay chain: make offboard
2. To stop Frequency running in the terminal: [Ctrl+C]
3. Stop the relay chain. make stop-relay
4. Run to remove unused volumes. make docker-prune
5. Clean up temporary directory to avoid any conflicts with next onboarding: rm -fr /tmp/frequency

All in Docker Container

❗ Currently does not work on M* series MacOS laptops. See #432

Start:

make start-frequency-docker

Stop:

make stop-frequency-docker

Node	Ports	Explorer URL
Frequency Relay Node	ws and rpc: 9944, p2p:30333	127.0.0.1:9944
Alice Relay Node	ws and rpc: 9946, p2p:30335	127.0.0.1:9946
Bob Relay Node	ws and rpc: 9947, p2p:30336	127.0.0.1:9947

Run Tests

# Run all the tests
make test
# Activate selected features
cargo test --features frequency

E2E Tests

To run the end-to-end tests, run make e2e-tests.

Run Benchmarks

make benchmarks

Run with offchain features

make start-frequency-with-offchain

Format, Lint and Audit Source Code

• Format code with make format according to style guidelines and configurations in rustfmt.toml.

• Lint code with make lint to catch common mistakes and improve your Rust code.

  _Note, if you get errors complaining about the wasm build, then you may need to install the wasm target for rust. You can do this with rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown

• Alternatively, run make format-lint to run both at the same time.

• Run make lint-audit to audit Cargo.lock files with cargo-deny for crates with security vulnerabilities reported to the RustSec Advisory Database. See cargo-deny installation instructions

Runtime

Verify Runtime

1. Check out the commit at which the runtime was built.
2. Use srtool and srtool-cli to verify the runtime:

   SRTOOL_TAG="1.77.0" srtool build \
           --build-opts="'--features on-chain-release-build,no-metadata-docs,frequency'" \
           --profile=release \
           --package=frequency-runtime \
           --root

Local Runtime Upgrade

To upgrade the runtime, run the following command:

Local Relay Chain

make upgrade-local

Standalone Chain (No Relay)

make upgrade-no-relay

Contributing

Interested in contributing? Wonderful! Please check out the information here.

Security Issue Reporting

Do you know of an on-chain vulnerability (or possible one) that can lead to economic loss, privacy loss, or instability of the network? Please report it by following the steps mentioned in here.

Additional Resources

• Cumulus Project
• Cumulus Tutorials
• Prep Substrate environment for development

Miscellaneous

# Clean up local docker resources
make docker-prune

# View all listening ports
lsof -i -P | grep -i "listen"

# View ports Frequency node is listening on
lsof -i -P | grep -i "listen" | grep frequency