fabric-dev-servers

This repository contains a number of helper scripts to start up a Hyperledger Fabric v1.2 network for development purposes. You can use the Hyperledger Fabric network created by these scripts to quickly deploy Blockchain business networks built using Hyperledger Composer, and test applications that depend on a running network.

Available versions of Hyperledger Fabric

This dev server package contains scripts to setup 3 different levels of fabric.

A released version of Hyperledger Fabric V1.0
A released version of Hyperledger Fabric V1.1
A released version of Hyperledger Fabric V1.2

You can select a version by setting the environment variable HL_FABRIC_VERSION. If set to hlfv1 you will get Hyperledger Fabric v1.0. If set to hlfv11 you will get Hyperledger Fabric V1.1. If set to hlfv12 or not set you will get Hyperledger Fabric V1.2.

If you are using Hyperledger Composer v0.16.x then you will want to use Hyperledger Fabric V1.0. If you are using Hyperledger Composer v0.17, v0.18 or v0.19 then you will want to use Hyperledger Fabric V1.1. If you are using Hyperledger Composer v0.20 or later then you will want to use Hyperledger Fabric V1.2.

Some of the scripts use the Hyperleder Composer CLI; previously these have used the composer executable that was on the system path. If you are running with a locally installed composer CLI, or a development build this meant that using the scripts could be hard.

Setting HL_COMPOSER_CLI to the actual version of composer you want will ensure it used. For example for a local install follow this

$ npm install composer-cli
$ # install locally to the node_modules directory of this packge
$ export HL_COMPOSER_CLI=$(npm bin)/composer
$ # this will now use the local version
$ npx composer --version
$ # this can be used to get npm to run the local version.

Note: to be more consistent the environment variables now also have HL_ prefixed alternatives

Usage

Step 1: Getting Hyperledger Fabric running

These scripts use bash and Docker. You must ensure that both bash and Docker are installed on the target system before running these scripts.

In a directory of your choice (these instructions will assume ~/fabric-tools), download the archive file that contains these tools. There are both .zip and .tar.gz formats - select one of these options:

$ mkdir ~/fabric-tools && cd ~/fabric-tools
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hyperledger/composer-tools/master/packages/fabric-dev-servers/fabric-dev-servers.zip
$ unzip fabric-dev-servers.zip

$ mkdir ~/fabric-tools && cd ~/fabric-tools
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hyperledger/composer-tools/master/packages/fabric-dev-servers/fabric-dev-servers.tar.gz
$ tar xzf fabric-dev-servers.tar.gz

Select the version of Hyperledger Fabric you wish to use. If for example you are using Hyperledger Composer v0.17 or higher then you should select Hyperledger Fabric V1.1 usually by exporting the environment variable as follows

export FABRIC_VERSION=hlfv11

If this is the first time that you have run these scripts, you'll need to download Hyperledger Fabric first. If you have already downloaded Hyperledger Fabric, then first start Hyperledger Fabric, and then create a Hyperledger Composer PeerAdmin card. After that you can then choose to stop Hyperledger Fabric, and start it again later. Alternatively, to completely clean up, you can teardown Hyperledger Fabric.

All the scripts will be available in the directory ~/fabric-tools. A typical sequence of commands for using these scripts with Hyperledger Composer would be:

$ cd ~/fabric-tools
$ ./downloadFabric.sh
$ ./startFabric.sh
$ ./createPeerAdminCard.sh

Then at the end of your development session:

$ cd ~/fabric-tools
$ ./stopFabric.sh
$ ./teardownFabric.sh

In practice however, this is a long set of commands to run, the startFabric.sh script will stop running containers, and start them. Docker will download any images that it doesn't have.