Running the devnet

This page walks through how to spin up a local Recall network on your machine (devnet) and presumes you've done the steps described in the preceding setup page. Most developers will never need to run the devnet. It's only useful if you're making changes to the core ipc protocol codebase and want to test your changes.

Overview

The devnet requires you run multiple services manually and have the binaries installed on your host machine. At a minimum, you'll need to install CometBFT, Fendermint, and Iroh. Optionally, you can also run the EVM RPC service, in case you want to interact with the devnet via EVM RPCs (e.g., deploying Solidity contracts). It's significantly faster to spin up as compared to the localnet setup.

Build dependencies

The following assumes you're working in the root of the ipc repo, and not in this scripts directory.

CometBFT

Navigate outside this repo and install CometBFT (note: you must install v0.37.1 since the latest version is not compatible with the rest of the codebase):

git clone https://github.com/cometbft/cometbft.git
cd cometbft
git checkout v0.37.1
make install

Fendermint & IPC CLI

Navigate back into ipc. The default make task will build the contracts, libraries, and CLIs needed to run a devnet.

make

Setup

First, configure the devnet with the following, which creates some keys and alters the configuration located in ~/.fendermint:

make config-devnet

The keys used here are a bit different from how the localnet setup works. The localnet relies on the ipc-cli for much of its logic, whereas the devnet relies primarily on the fendermint CLI.

Accounts

The keys you'll use can be found in the test-network/keys directory within this scripts folder. Only the alice key is deterministically coded into the Fendermint startup process. You can export any of the keys to a hex encoded EVM format.

From the root of this repo, run the following command, replacing alice.sk with the corresponding filename and alice_eth with a desired name (for files that get created later):

fendermint key into-eth --secret-key ./scripts/test-network/keys/alice.sk --name alice_eth

Since the alice.sk will always be the same, the following is consistent across machines and can be used for devnet interactions (e.g., creating buckets, timehubs, writing data, etc.):

• EVM address: 0xc05fe6b63ffa4b3c518e6ff1e597358ee839db01
• Hex private key: 1c323d494d1d069fe4c891350a1ec691c4216c17418a0cb3c7533b143bd2b812

Startup & shutdown

Finally, start all the services in separate terminal windows in the following order. The associated endpoints are shown below.

make run-devnet-iroh

make run-devnet-objects

make run-devnet-fendermint

make run-devnet-cometbft

make run-devnet-evm

Once these are running, you should be able to interact with the devnet and most of the expected functionality. One thing to be aware of: there's no parent (rootnet), so certain parts of the protocol (like deploying parent contracts, ERC20s, or Solidity wrappers) don't happen automatically.

Lastly, keep in mind that if you ever make changes to the core ipc codebase and want the devnet to use these changes, you'll need to shut these services down (i.e., exit the processes), run make, and then make config-devnet again.

Usage

If you're using the recall CLI, you must set the RECALL_NETWORK environment variable to devnet in order to use it. Note that fendermint ipc-cli the NETWORK flag but with different target functionality, so be sure the RECALL_ prefix is attached.

export RECALL_NETWORK=devnet
export RECALL_PRIVATE_KEY=1c323d494d1d069fe4c891350a1ec691c4216c17418a0cb3c7533b143bd2b812

Similarly, you'll use the devnet in the Rust SDK where necessary—e.g., recall_sdk::network::Network::Devnet.init(), or the JS SDK lets you import the devnet chain.