Parity setup instructions

These instructions are modeled from the parity demo PoA tutorial and customized for running the Ouroboros protocol in a variety of situations for experimental setup.

Build Parity

• Install Rust 1.18.0 using https://rustup.rs/.
• Check out the ouroboros branch of the parity fork: https://github.com/input-output-hk/parity/tree/ouroboros
• Compile in release mode: cargo build --release. The resulting binary will be target/release/parity.

Parity RPC generator

You will also need to cargo build the RPC, which makes it easier to generate transaction JSON requests.

Single node setup

• Start parity in order to create an account using parity --config single-node-initial.toml

• Create the validator/stakeholder account:

  curl --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"parity_newAccountFromPhrase","params":["node1", "node1"],"id":0}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST localhost:8541
  

  This should return:

  
  {"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":"0x00aa39d30f0d20ff03a22ccfc30b7efbfca597c2","id":0}
  

• Create a non-stakeholder account:

  curl --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"parity_newAccountFromPhrase","params":["user", "user"],"id":0}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST localhost:8541
  

  This should return:

  {"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":"0x004ec07d2329997267ec62b4166639513386f32e","id":0}
  

• If desired, modify the account balance of each account in single-node-config.json under the accounts key. The amount should be large.

• Stop parity

• Restart with parity --config single-node.toml, this now has node1 configured as a signer

• Create some transactions to send by running theRPC generator with the config file single-node-rpc-generator-config.json. The balances in single-node-rpc-generator-config.json are the initial amounts available to transfer; these amounts need to fit in a u64. Optionally specify the number of transactions to generate:

  parity-rpc-generator --config single-node-rpc-generator-config.json --transactions 50
  

• With the rpc.json generated, send the request:

  curl --data @/absolute/path/to/rpc.json -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST localhost:8541
  

Viewing blocks

• In the parity logs, you should see transactions being mined, which looks like:

  2017-06-23 14:14:40  Transaction mined (hash fb8b6a122d4a2a77550ace5564fb613501e92b4f3d5e2bc1fb7bb8175f27d826)
  

• The number of blocks should go up. The number of the last block is near the beginning of each line. Example of mining block #7:

  2017-06-23 13:46:37  Syncing       #6 78d8…bf6f     0 blk/s // etc...
  2017-06-23 13:46:47  Syncing       #7 068b…eb29     0 blk/s // etc...
  

• You can see the last block that was mined by requesting it via the API:

  curl --data '{"method":"eth_getBlockByNumber","params":["latest",true],"id":1,"jsonrpc":"2.0"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST localhost:8541
  

Generating RPC requests

Running

RPC generator

USAGE:
    parity-rpc-generator [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
        --config <FILE.json>
    -o, --output <OUTPUT>        [default: rpc.json]
        --seed <N>
        --transactions <N>       [default: 10]

Config JSON example

[
  {
    "id": "alpha",
    "balance": "1000000",
    "password": "hunter2"
  },
  {
    "id": "beta",
    "balance": "1",
    "password": "qwerty"
  }
]