Substrate Frameless Node Template

A stripped down version of the node template, ready for hackin'.

Coding Activity 1 - Flipper Runtime

We have prepared a FRAME-less runtime. It does, by all means nothing as it is now.

Try and do as many of the following, in the same order:

1. Make it a flipper: it stores one bool value, and per each transaction, flips that value.
2. Make it an adder: it stores one u32 value, and each transaction specifies a number, which is added to this value and stored onchain again.
3. Extend your transaction so that the runtime can be either an adder or a multiplier.
4. Add a kill-switch to this runtime. Look into well_known_keys to see which key you have to wipe.
5. Make this runtime upgradable! The upgrade operation can simply be protected by a "password" as you don't have any notion of accounts yet.
6. Add a notion of accounts and nonces and signatures.
7. Add a notion of balances
8. Write a custom runtime API, and try to call it over the RPC.
9. Implement a tx-pool api, implement tipping, priority, longevity etc.

.. you can virtually do endless experiments on top of the frameless runtime. Make good ues of it, and you will learn a lot about the fundamentals of substrate!

Moreover, this is the perfect intro to FRAME. You feel the pain of how hard it is to code your own blockchain from scratch 😈.

Build

The cargo run command will perform an initial build. Use the following command to build the node without launching it:

cargo b -r

Embedded CLI Docs

Once the project has been built, the following command can be used to explore all parameters and subcommands:

./target/release/node-template -h

Single-Node Development Chain

This command will start the single-node development chain with non-persistent state:

./target/release/node-template --dev

Purge the development chain's state:

./target/release/node-template purge-chain --dev

Start the development chain with detailed logging:

RUST_BACKTRACE=1 ./target/release/node-template -ldebug --dev

In case of being interested in maintaining the chain's state between runs a base path must be added:

// Create a folder to use as the db base path
$ mkdir my-chain-state

// Use of that folder to store the chain state
$ ./target/release/node-template --dev --base-path ./my-chain-state/

// Check the folder structure created inside the base path after running the chain
$ ls ./my-chain-state
chains
$ ls ./my-chain-state/chains/
dev
$ ls ./my-chain-state/chains/dev
db keystore network