Lightchain Explorer

This project was forked from ETC Block Explorer Development.

Live Version: explorer.lightstreams.io

Installation

Pre-requirements

• Nodejs and npm
• Mongo-db
• Lightchain

Lightchain

Installation To install lightchain you can follow the instructions written at the lightchain repository.

Also Lightstreams team provides precompiled binaries for macOd and Linux amd64: == macOS ==

wget "https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/lightstreams-public/lightchain/lightchain-osx" -O /usr/local/bin/lightchain

== Linux (amd64) ==

wget "https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/lightstreams-public/lightchain/lightchain-linux-amd64" -O /usr/local/bin/lightchain

Run Lightchain node

In order to run a local explorer we need a local lightchain node running locally first. Firstly, and ONLY IF YOU DIDN'T DO IT BEFORE, we need to initialize the lightchain data directory:

lightchain init --datadir=${HOME}/.lightchain

Once we have the lightchain node initialize we run the synchronization of the node, enabling the rpc API as follow:

lightchain run --datadir=${HOME}/.lightchain --rpc --rpcapi admin,db,eth,net,shh,txpool,personal,web3

The synchronization might take several minutes, but you can continuous to next step. If you want to see more option regarding every possible option of lightchain visit our cli docs

How to use it

Clone Repository

git clone https://github.com/lightstreams-network/lightchain-explorer

Install dependencies

npm install

Create a config setting file using sample version

mv config.json.sample config.json

The setup configuration is stored at config.json. Edit its content to match your local requirements:

{
    "nodeAddr":     "localhost",
    "gethPort":     8545,
    "tendermintAddr": "127.0.0.1:26657",
    "syncConsensus" : true,
    "startBlock":   0,
    "quiet":        false,
    "syncAll":      true,
    "patch":        true,
    "patchBlocks":  100,
    "bulkSize":     100,
    ...
}

The most relevant properties are the next ones:

• nodeAddr Your node API RPC address. It runs part of lightchain node and it listens on interface localhost.

• gethPort Your node API RPC port. It runs as part of lightchain node and it listens on port 8545.

• tendermintAddr Your Tendermint API RPC. It runs as part of lightchain node and it listens on 127.0.0.1:26657.

• startBlock This is the start block of the blockchain, should always be 0 if you want to sync the whole ETC blockchain.

• endBlock This is usually the 'latest'/'newest' block in the blockchain, this value gets updated automatically, and will be used to patch missing blocks if the whole app goes down.

• quiet Suppress some messages. (admittedly still not quiet)

• syncAll If this is set to true at the start of the app, the sync will start syncing all blocks from lastSync, and if lastSync is 0 it will start from whatever the endBlock or latest block in the blockchain is.

• patch If set to true and below value is set, sync will iterated through the # of blocks specified.

• patchBlocks If patch is set to true, the amount of block specified will be check from the latest one.

Explorer service is split into two sub-services, one for populating the local mongodb database with the information fetch from the local lightchain node, and a second one to serve the UI and the endpoints used for this UI.

Once said that, we firstly launch the sync process:

npm run sync

After that we will see how we connect to the local node and retrive blocks and transactions to be stored in mongodb.

Now on a different terminal we run:

npm run app

This will start a node server on localhost:3000 serving your local version of the blockchain explorer.

We also could run both process in parallel using:

npm run start

Troubleshooting

Cleaning DB

Data is being allocated into a DB names blockDB in mongo. In case we need to re-sync our db we shoud wipe the database beforehand as follow:

mongo blockDB --eval "db.dropDatabase();"