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Documentation

Building the source

For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please stick to the official Go-Ethereum Installation Instructions.

Building iron requires both a Go (version 1.7 or later) and a C compiler. So you may need to install Go if you don't have Golang in your system. You can install them using your favourite package manager (brew is a good option for MacOS). Once the dependencies are installed, run

git clone https://github.com/iron-bank/go-IRON.git
cd go-IRON
make geth

After it is successfully compiled, copy it so user can access it from any location of the machine (MacOS).

sudo cp build/bin/iron /usr/local/bin

In case this doesn't work, just copy and paste the entire path to the iron instance and run this command:

sudo cp <entire-path-to-iron-instance-in-your-system> /usr/local/bin

Running an iron node

By far the most common scenario is people wanting to simply interact with the Iron Bank Network Dapp: 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:

$ iron --fast --cache=1024 console

This command will:

  • Start iron in fast sync mode (--fast), causing it to download more data in exchange for avoiding processing the entire history of the Iron Bank Network, which is very CPU intensive.

  • Bump the memory allowance of the database to 1024MB (--cache=1024) or 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. You also may use $ iron --fast --cache=512 console , in case you don't have enough memory.

  • Start up iron's built-in interactive JavaScript console, (via the trailing console subcommand) through which you can invoke all official web3 methods as well as iron's own management APIs. This too is optional and if you leave it out you can always attach to an already running iron instance with iron attach.

Creating your first Address

Once you are in the javaScript console, you may interact with the blockchain and create a new address (remember you need to sync with the network first). Just type the following command:

> personal.newAccount()

The console will ask you for a password for this account twice (keep it safe!). Then, your address will show up, congratualtions!!!

In order to see all your accounts just type the following command inside the javaScript console:

> personal.listAccounts

Unlock your Account to interact

If a red error box appears while you try to interact with the blockchain saying you need to unlock your account. You need to do so by typing the following command in the javaScript console of your running iron node.

> personal.unlockAccount("<your-account-address>")

This will allow you to interact with the blockchain for a few minutes. This is a safety measure to avoid others stealing your funds. Alternatively, you can run the command --unlock <your-account-address> while starting your node to unlock your accounts instantly. e.g:

$ iron --fast --cache=1024 --unlock <your-account-address> console

Start mining locally to test your contracts

In order to test functionalities while using the Dapp, you need to mine locally to execute transactions. It's as simple as type the following command in the JavaScript console:

> miner.start()

Then, you can stop mining (saving CPU usage if your computer get slower) using the next command:

> miner.stop()

Sync Iron Bank Network (only private networks for testing)

During the development stage you are able to set private networks to test the functionality of the contracts. Thus, you need to sync and connect to your local peers via --bootnodes to interact with the Iron Bank Network while using the Dapp. Just need an enode to sync and connect to the blockchain via the --bootnodes flag, following this structure:

$ iron --bootnodes <bootnode-enode-parameters>

Executables

The Go-IRON project comes with several wrappers/executables found in the cmd directory.

Command Description
iron Our main iron CLI client. It is the entry point into the iron 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 Iron Bank Network via JSON RPC endpoints exposed on top of HTTP, WebSocket and/or IPC transports. Check iron --help and the official Go-Ethereum CLI Wiki page for command line options.
abigen Source code generator to convert Ethereum contract definitions into easy to use, compile-time type-safe Go packages. It operates on plain Ethereum 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 the official Go-Ethereum Native DApps wiki page for details.
bootnode Stripped down version of the iron 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 (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that is capable of running bytecode snippets within a configurable environment and execution mode. Its purpose is to allow isolated, fine-grained debugging of EVM opcodes (e.g. evm --code 60ff60ff --debug).
gmcrpctest Developer utility tool to support the ethereum/rpc-test test suite which validates baseline conformity to the Ethereum 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 Ethereum-based iron protocol both network as well as consensus wise) to user friendlier hierarchical representation (e.g. rlpdump --hex CE0183FFFFFFC4C304050583616263).
swarm swarm daemon and tools. This is the entrypoint for the swarm network. swarm --help for command line options and subcommands. See https://swarm-guide.readthedocs.io for swarm documentation.
puppeth a CLI wizard that aids in creating a new Ethereum-based network.

Configuration

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

$ iron --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:

$ iron --your-favourite-flags dumpconfig

Note: This works only with iron v2.1.0 and above.

Docker quick start

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

docker run -d --name iron-node -v /Users/alice/iron:/root \
           -p 8545:8545 -p 30303:30303 \
           iron/client-go --fast --cache=512

This will start iron 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 iron nodes

As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with iron and the iron network via your own programs and not manually through the console. To aid this, iron has built in support for a JSON-RPC based APIs (standard APIs and iron 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 iron, 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: 8545)
  • --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: 8546)
  • --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 iron 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 iron nodes with exposed APIs! Further, all browser tabs can access locally running webservers, so malicious webpages could try to subvert locally available APIs!

Running a private miner

Everyone is still capable of mining using a single CPU miner instance, this is more than enough for practical purposes as it can produce a stable stream of blocks at the correct intervals without needing heavy resources (consider running on a single thread, no need for multiple ones either). To start a iron instance for mining, run it with all your usual flags, extended by:

$ iron <usual-flags> --mine --minerthreads=1 --etherbase=0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (your address)

Which will start mining bocks and transactions on a single CPU thread, crediting all proceedings to the account specified by --etherbase. You can further tune the mining by changing the default gas limit blocks converge to (--targetgaslimit) and the price transactions are accepted at (--gasprice).

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!

If you'd like to contribute to go-IRON, please fork, fix, commit and send a pull request for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base. If you wish to submit more complex changes though, please check up with the core devs to ensure those changes are in line with the general philosophy of the project and/or get some early feedback which can make both your efforts much lighter as well as our review and merge procedures quick and simple.

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 Go-Ethereum Developers' Guide for more details on configuring your environment, managing project dependencies and testing procedures.

License

Go-IRON is a fork of the Go-Ethereum client and library. The go-IRON 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-IRON 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.