Go Bither

Binary archives are published at https://github.com/bitherhq/go-bither/releases/.

Building the source

Building bith requires both a Go (version 1.7 or later) and a C compiler. You can install them using your favourite package manager. Once the dependencies are installed, run

make bith

or, to build the full suite of utilities:

make all

Executables

The go-bither project comes with several wrappers/executables found in the cmd directory.

Command	Description
bith	Our main Bither CLI client. It is the entry point into the Bither network (main-, test- or private net), capable of running as a full node (default) archive node (retaining all historical state) or a light node (retrieving data live). It can be used by other processes as a gateway into the Bither network via JSON RPC endpoints exposed on top of HTTP, WebSocket and/or IPC transports. bith --help and the CLI Wiki page for command line options.
abigen	Source code generator to convert Bither contract definitions into easy to use, compile-time type-safe Go packages. It operates on plain Bither contract ABIs with expanded functionality if the contract bytecode is also available. However it also accepts Solidity source files, making development much more streamlined. Please see our Native DApps wiki page for details.
bootnode	Stripped down version of our Bither client implementation that only takes part in the network node discovery protocol, but does not run any of the higher level application protocols. It can be used as a lightweight bootstrap node to aid in finding peers in private networks.
evm	Developer utility version of the EVM (Bither Virtual Machine) that is capable of running bytecode snippets within a configurable environment and execution mode. Its purpose is to allow insolated, fine-grained debugging of EVM opcodes (e.g. evm --code 60ff60ff --debug).
gethrpctest	Developer utility tool to support our bitherhq/rpc-test test suite which validates baseline conformity to the Bither JSON RPC specs. Please see the test suite's readme for details.
rlpdump	Developer utility tool to convert binary RLP (Recursive Length Prefix) dumps (data encoding used by the Bither protocol both network as well as consensus wise) to user friendlier hierarchical representation (e.g. rlpdump --hex CE0183FFFFFFC4C304050583616263).
puppeth	a CLI wizard that aids in creating a new Bither network.

Running bith

Going through all the possible command line flags is out of scope here, but we've enumerated a few common parameter combos to get you up to speed quickly on how you can run your own Bith instance.

Full node on the main Bither network

By far the most common scenario is people wanting to simply interact with the Bither network: create accounts; transfer funds; deploy and interact with contracts. For this particular use-case the user doesn't care about years-old historical data, so we can fast-sync quickly to the current state of the network. To do so:

$ bith --fast --cache=512 console

This command will:

• Start bith in fast sync mode (--fast), causing it to download more data in exchange for avoiding processing the entire history of the Bither network, which is very CPU intensive.
• Bump the memory allowance of the database to 512MB (--cache=512), which can help significantly in sync times especially for HDD users. This flag is optional and you can set it as high or as low as you'd like, though we'd recommend the 512MB - 2GB range.
• Start up Bith's built-in interactive JavaScript console, (via the trailing console subcommand) through which you can invoke all official web3 methods as well as Bith's own management APIs. This too is optional and if you leave it out you can always attach to an already running Bith instance with bith attach.

Full node on the Bither test network

Transitioning towards developers, if you'd like to play around with creating Bither contracts, you almost certainly would like to do that without any real money involved until you get the hang of the entire system. In other words, instead of attaching to the main network, you want to join the test network with your node, which is fully equivalent to the main network, but with play-Ether only.

$ bith --testnet --fast --cache=512 console

The --fast, --cache flags and console subcommand have the exact same meaning as above and they are equally useful on the testnet too. Please see above for their explanations if you've skipped to here.

Specifying the --testnet flag however will reconfigure your Bith instance a bit:

• Instead of using the default data directory (~/.bither on Linux for example), Bith will nest itself one level deeper into a testnet subfolder (~/.bither/testnet on Linux). Note, on OSX and Linux this also means that attaching to a running testnet node requires the use of a custom endpoint since bith attach will try to attach to a production node endpoint by default. E.g. bith attach <datadir>/testnet/bith.ipc. Windows users are not affected by this.
• Instead of connecting the main Bither network, the client will connect to the test network, which uses different P2P bootnodes, different network IDs and genesis states.

Note: Although there are some internal protective measures to prevent transactions from crossing over between the main network and test network, you should make sure to always use separate accounts for play-money and real-money. Unless you manually move accounts, Bith will by default correctly separate the two networks and will not make any accounts available between them.

Configuration

As an alternative to passing the numerous flags to the bith binary, you can also pass a configuration file via:

$ bith --config /path/to/your_config.toml

To get an idea how the file should look like you can use the dumpconfig subcommand to export your existing configuration:

$ bith --your-favourite-flags dumpconfig

Note: This works only with bith v1.6.0 and above.

Docker quick start

One of the quickest ways to get Bither up and running on your machine is by using Docker:

docker run -d --name bither-node -v /Users/alice/bither:/root \
           -p 7070:7070 -p 41207:41207 \
           bitherhq/go-bither --fast --cache=512

This will start bith in fast sync mode with a DB memory allowance of 512MB just as the above command does. It will also create a persistent volume in your home directory for saving your blockchain as well as map the default ports. There is also an alpine tag available for a slim version of the image.

Programatically interfacing Bith nodes

As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with Bith and the Bither network via your own programs and not manually through the console. To aid this, Bith has built in support for a JSON-RPC based APIs (standard APIs and Bith specific APIs). These can be exposed via HTTP, WebSockets and IPC (unix sockets on unix based platforms, and named pipes on Windows).

The IPC interface is enabled by default and exposes all the APIs supported by Bith, whereas the HTTP and WS interfaces need to manually be enabled and only expose a subset of APIs due to security reasons. These can be turned on/off and configured as you'd expect.

HTTP based JSON-RPC API options:

• --rpc Enable the HTTP-RPC server
• --rpcaddr HTTP-RPC server listening interface (default: "localhost")
• --rpcport HTTP-RPC server listening port (default: 7070)
• --rpcapi API's offered over the HTTP-RPC interface (default: "eth,net,web3")
• --rpccorsdomain Comma separated list of domains from which to accept cross origin requests (browser enforced)
• --ws Enable the WS-RPC server
• --wsaddr WS-RPC server listening interface (default: "localhost")
• --wsport WS-RPC server listening port (default: 7071)
• --wsapi API's offered over the WS-RPC interface (default: "eth,net,web3")
• --wsorigins Origins from which to accept websockets requests
• --ipcdisable Disable the IPC-RPC server
• --ipcapi API's offered over the IPC-RPC interface (default: "admin,debug,eth,miner,net,personal,shh,txpool,web3")
• --ipcpath Filename for IPC socket/pipe within the datadir (explicit paths escape it)

You'll need to use your own programming environments' capabilities (libraries, tools, etc) to connect via HTTP, WS or IPC to a Bith node configured with the above flags and you'll need to speak JSON-RPC on all transports. You can reuse the same connection for multiple requests!

Note: Please understand the security implications of opening up an HTTP/WS based transport before doing so! Hackers on the internet are actively trying to subvert Bither nodes with exposed APIs! Further, all browser tabs can access locally running webservers, so malicious webpages could try to subvert locally available APIs!

Operating a private network

Maintaining your own private network is more involved as a lot of configurations taken for granted in the official networks need to be manually set up.

Defining the private genesis state

First, you'll need to create the genesis state of your networks, which all nodes need to be aware of and agree upon. This consists of a small JSON file (e.g. call it genesis.json):

{
  "config": {
        "chainId": 0,
        "homesteadBlock": 0,
        "eip155Block": 0,
        "eip158Block": 0
    },
  "alloc"      : {},
  "coinbase"   : "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "difficulty" : "0x20000",
  "extraData"  : "",
  "gasLimit"   : "0x2fefd8",
  "nonce"      : "0x0000000000000042",
  "mixhash"    : "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "parentHash" : "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
  "timestamp"  : "0x00"
}

The above fields should be fine for most purposes, although we'd recommend changing the nonce to some random value so you prevent unknown remote nodes from being able to connect to you. If you'd like to pre-fund some accounts for easier testing, you can populate the alloc field with account configs:

"alloc": {
  "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000001": {"balance": "111111111"},
  "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000002": {"balance": "222222222"}
}

With the genesis state defined in the above JSON file, you'll need to initialize every Bith node with it prior to starting it up to ensure all blockchain parameters are correctly set:

$ bith init path/to/genesis.json

Creating the rendezvous point

With all nodes that you want to run initialized to the desired genesis state, you'll need to start a bootstrap node that others can use to find each other in your network and/or over the internet. The clean way is to configure and run a dedicated bootnode:

$ bootnode --genkey=boot.key
$ bootnode --nodekey=boot.key

With the bootnode online, it will display an enode URL that other nodes can use to connect to it and exchange peer information. Make sure to replace the displayed IP address information (most probably [::]) with your externally accessible IP to get the actual enode URL.

Note: You could also use a full fledged Bith node as a bootnode, but it's the less recommended way.

Starting up your member nodes

With the bootnode operational and externally reachable (you can try telnet <ip> <port> to ensure it's indeed reachable), start every subsequent Bith node pointed to the bootnode for peer discovery via the --bootnodes flag. It will probably also be desirable to keep the data directory of your private network separated, so do also specify a custom --datadir flag.

$ bith --datadir=path/to/custom/data/folder --bootnodes=<bootnode-enode-url-from-above>

Note: Since your network will be completely cut off from the main and test networks, you'll also need to configure a miner to process transactions and create new blocks for you.

Contribution

Thank you for considering to help out with the source code! We welcome contributions from anyone on the internet, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes!

Please make sure your contributions adhere to our coding guidelines:

• Code must adhere to the official Go formatting guidelines (i.e. uses gofmt).
• Code must be documented adhering to the official Go commentary guidelines.
• Pull requests need to be based on and opened against the master branch.
• Commit messages should be prefixed with the package(s) they modify.
  • E.g. "eth, rpc: make trace configs optional"

Please see the Developers' Guide for more details on configuring your environment, managing project dependencies and testing procedures.

License

The go-bither library (i.e. all code outside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING.LESSER file.

The go-bither binaries (i.e. all code inside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, also included in our repository in the COPYING file.