Supporting Gossamer for the spawn phase

[qdm12]

Hi there 👋

I'm Quentin, part of the team working on Gossamer, the Go Polkadot host.

Our team has been eyeing Zombienet for a few months now, and me and Ed from our team attended recently the Zombienet talk by Javier at Sub0 Lisbon.

This made us realise we had a bunch of Go code and docker-compose configurations aiming to do what Zombienet does (but so far behind, obviously!).
The solution seems obvious: we need Zombienet to be able to spawn Gossamer nodes ⭐ That would help us tremendously improve our CI and testing strategy.

There are a few questions on that:

1. How does Zombinet configure Substrate nodes? We probably need to harmonize configuration flags/files between the two, we can do modifications to Gossamer or we can have translations in Zombienet 🤔
2. Gossamer doesn't handle Parachains for now, so we would have to disable this in Zombienet for Gossamer nodes
3. We believe the testing phase of Zombienet should work as-is with Gossamer (it has logs, an rpc server matching the spec), do you also think this is the case?
4. Side question: do you support other hosts such as Smoldot already?

Thank you!

[pepoviola]

Hi @qdm12,
Thanks for your feedback and open this thread, related to your questions.

1. How does Zombinet configure Substrate nodes? We probably need to harmonize configuration flags/files between the two, we can do modifications to Gossamer or we can have translations in Zombienet 🤔

Zombienet at the moment allow you to configure how to run your node in a couple of ways:

• You can define the command to run the node and the arguments to use, but in this case Zombienet will add this args by default

    --rpc-cors all --unsafe-rpc-external --rpc-methods unsafe --unsafe-ws-external

And the reset of the args can be managed by config keys in your network topology file (toml/json)

• You can also define the command and the arguments to run with command_with_args, in this case Zombienet will use the supplied configuration to run the node.

2. Gossamer doesn't handle Parachains for now, so we would have to disable this in Zombienet for Gossamer nodes

Yes, you can define only the relaychain and works as expected.

We believe the testing phase of Zombienet should work as-is with Gossamer (it has logs, an rpc server matching the spec), do you also think this is the case?

Yes, I have to make a PoC running Gossamer nodes but if the node expose an rpc server and metrics through prometheus should works as expected.

Side question: do you support other hosts such as Smoldot already?

At the moment we didn't test with Smoldot as host, but I think should works (ping @wirednkod). As side node, substrate-connect use Zombienet in their CI.

Again, thanks for your feedback and we can help you to setup a PoC using Zombienet and Gossamer. Please ping us if you have questions.

Thanks!