Zebra: the Zcash Foundation client.

⚠️ Zebra is currently alpha software and subject to change. We do not recommend running Zebra on mainnet yet. ⚠️

We are currently in the process of heavy refactoring; for the next several weeks, it's very likely that external PRs may fall out of sync or have code refactored out from under them.

Blog: Parity teams up with Zcash Foundation for Parity Zcash client

• Installing from source

• Installing the snap

• Running tests

• Going online

• Importing zcashd database

• Command line interface

• JSON-RPC

• Logging

• Internal Documentation

Installing from source

Installing zebra from source requires rustc and cargo.

Minimal supported version is rustc 1.35.0 (fd19989 2019-05-23), and we generally target the stable channel.

Install rustc and cargo

Both rustc and cargo are a part of rust tool-chain.

An easy way to install the stable binaries for Linux and Mac is to run this in your shell:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

Windows binaries can be downloaded from rust-lang website.

Install C and C++ compilers

You will need the clang and gcc compilers plus cmake to build some of the dependencies.

On macOS

You will need to make sure you have Xcode installed. If you already have Homebrew installed, you probably also already have the Xcode tools installed as well. If not, you can run the command below:

xcode-select --install

On Linux

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake clang

Clone and build zebra

Now let's clone zebra and enter it's directory:

git clone https://github.com/ZcashFoundation/zebra
cd zebra

# builds zebra in release mode
cargo build -p zebra --release

zebra is now available at ./target/release/zebra.

Installing the snap

In any of the supported Linux distros:

sudo snap install zebra --edge

Running tests

zebra has internal unit tests and it conforms to external integration tests.

Running unit tests

Assuming that repository is already cloned, we can run unit tests with this command:

cargo test --all

Going online

By default parity connects to Zcash seednodes. Full list is here.

To start syncing the main network, just start the client without any arguments:

./target/release/zebra

To start syncing the testnet:

./target/release/zebra --testnet

To not print any syncing progress add --quiet flag:

./target/release/zebra --quiet

Importing zcashd database

It it is possible to import existing zcashd database:

# where $ZCASH_DB is path to your zcashd database. By default:
# on macOS: "/Users/user/Library/Application Support/Zcash"
# on Linux: "~/.zcash"
./target/release/zebra import "$ZCASH_DB/blocks"

By default, import verifies the imported blocks. You can disable this, by adding the --verification-level=none option.

./target/release/zebra --verification-level=none import "$ZCASH_DB/blocks"

Command line interface

Full list of CLI options, which is available under zebra --help: see here

Logging

This is a section only for developers and power users.

You can enable detailed client logging by setting the environment variable RUST_LOG, e.g.,

RUST_LOG=verification=info ./target/release/zebra

zebra started with this environment variable will print all logs coming from verification module with verbosity info or higher. Available log levels are:

• error
• warn
• info
• debug
• trace

It's also possible to start logging from multiple modules in the same time:

RUST_LOG=sync=trace,p2p=trace,verification=trace,db=trace ./target/release/zebra

Internal documentation

Once released, zebra documentation will be available here. Meanwhile it's only possible to build it locally:

cd zebra
./tools/doc.sh
open target/doc/zebra/index.html