Nori

Nori (のり) - Derived from "Norikae" (乗り換え), meaning transfer or switch, this name reflects the idea of efficiently switching or balancing network requests, akin to a load balancer or router.

It's essentially a fork of Optimism proxyd, adapted to work with Starknet.

This tool implements nori, an RPC request router and proxy. It does the following things:

1. Whitelists RPC methods.
2. Routes RPC methods to groups of backend services.
3. Automatically retries failed backend requests.
4. Track backend consensus (latest, safe, finalized blocks), peer count and sync state.
5. Re-write requests and responses to enforce consensus.
6. Load balance requests across backend services.
7. Cache immutable responses from backends.
8. Provides metrics the measure request latency, error rates, and the like.

Usage

Run make nori to build the binary. No additional dependencies are necessary.

To configure nori for use, you'll need to create a configuration file to define your proxy backends and routing rules. Check out example.config.toml for how to do this alongside a full list of all options with commentary.

Once you have a config file, start the daemon via nori <path-to-config>.toml.

Consensus awareness

Starting on v4.0.0, nori is aware of the consensus state of its backends. This helps minimize chain reorgs experienced by clients.

To enable this behavior, you must set consensus_aware value to true in the backend group.

When consensus awareness is enabled, nori will poll the backends for their states and resolve a consensus group based on:

• the common ancestor latest block, i.e. if a backend is experiencing a fork, the fork won't be visible to the clients
• the lowest safe block (ACCEPTED_ON_L2 status)
• the lowest finalized block (ACCEPTED_ON_L1 status)
• peer count
• sync state

The backend group then acts as a round-robin load balancer distributing traffic equally across healthy backends in the consensus group, increasing the availability of the proxy.

A backend is considered healthy if it meets the following criteria:

• not banned
• avg 1-min moving window error rate ≤ configurable threshold
• avg 1-min moving window latency ≤ configurable threshold
• peer count ≥ configurable threshold
• latest block lag ≤ configurable threshold
• last state update ≤ configurable threshold
• not currently syncing

When a backend is experiencing inconsistent consensus, high error rates or high latency, the backend will be banned for a configurable amount of time (default 5 minutes) and won't receive any traffic during this period.

Tag rewrite

When consensus awareness is enabled, nori will enforce the consensus state transparently for all the clients.

For example, if a client requests the starknet_getBlockWithTxs method with the latest tag, nori will rewrite the request to use the resolved latest block from the consensus group and forward it to the backend.

The following request methods are rewritten:

• starknet_call *
• starknet_estimateFee *
• starknet_estimateMessageFee *
• starknet_getBlockTransactionCount *
• starknet_getBlockWithReceipts *
• starknet_getBlockWithTxHashes *
• starknet_getBlockWithTxs *
• starknet_getClass *
• starknet_getClassAt *
• starknet_getClassHashAt *
• starknet_getNonce *
• starknet_getStateUpdate *
• starknet_getStorageAt *
• starknet_getTransactionByBlockIdAndIndex *

* not implemented

And starknet_blockNumber response is overridden with current block consensus.

Cacheable methods

Cache use Redis and can be enabled for the following immutable methods:

• starknet_chainId
• starknet_getBlockTransactionCount
• starknet_getBlockWithReceipts (block hash only)
• starknet_getBlockWithTxs
• starknet_getTransactionByIdAndIndex

Meta method consensus_getReceipts

Only available after v0.7.0-rc0

To support backends with different specifications in the same backend group, nori exposes a convenient method to fetch receipts abstracting away what specific backend will serve the request.

Each backend specifies their preferred method to fetch receipts with consensus_receipts_target config, which will be translated from consensus_getReceipts.

This method takes a blockId (i.e. tag|qty|hash) and returns the receipts for all transactions in the block.

Request example

{
  "jsonrpc":"2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "params": [{"block_hash": "0xc6ef2fc5426d6ad6fd9e2a26abeab0aa2411b7ab17f30a99d3cb96aed1d1055b"}]
}

It currently supports translation to the following targets:

• starknet_getBlockWithReceipts(blockId) (default)

The selected target is returned in the response, in a wrapped result.

Response example

{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "result": {
    "method": "debug_getRawReceipts",
    "result": {
      // the actual raw result from backend
    }
  }
}

Metrics

See metrics.go for a list of all available metrics.

The metrics port is configurable via the metrics.port and metrics.host keys in the config.

Adding Backend SSL Certificates in Docker

The Docker image runs on Alpine Linux. If you get SSL errors when connecting to a backend within Docker, you may need to add additional certificates to Alpine's certificate store. To do this, bind mount the certificate bundle into a file in /usr/local/share/ca-certificates. The entrypoint.sh script will then update the store with whatever is in the ca-certificates directory prior to starting nori.