Testnet in a box

TNB (testnet-in-a-box) will deploy a collection of monitored and peered zcashd instances to a Kubernetes cluster.

A deployment requires 2 tar archives:

• An archive of binaries from a TNB build (zcashd, zcash-cli, zcash-gtest, zcash-tx) see the task for more info: ./docs/BUILD-zcashd-tnb-artifacts-ipfs.md
• An archive of a block snapshot from the regular testnet, see the task for more info: ./bases/tekton/tasks/snapshot-gcp.yml

The versions and source of these archives is defined in deploy/configmaps-tnb.yml

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: zcash-tnb-bundle
data:
  ARCHIVE_NAME: zcashd-tnb-artifacts-d292376.tgz
  ARCHIVE_HTTP_SRC: https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmemvQmN8bdqH2S7EZQ3hCXsmoGbTXNcN5vaL98CVQ2yXv
  SNAPSHOT_NAME: zcash-testnet-miner-1009419.tgz
  SNAPSHOT_HTTP_SRC: https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmZwuN84PVBKqZQV1kuJSCvYX9L31vh2PJAA2129wdrZ37

Deployment

Install kind
See ./README-ipfs.sh

(Important note: As of 7-30-2020, please do not run README.sh as a script. Instead copy/paste commands into terminal.)

Post deployment

Once everything has deloyed correctly, you can view/interact with the testnetinabox cluster with a few different tools. The Grafana dashboard will provide visual data of peer activities and certain RPCs. The Lens IDE will allow users to connect to pods and run commands, as the cluster maintains the control-plane. Otherwise, users can issue commands from terminal to retrieve/interact with zcash data.

View dashboard

kubectl port-forward svc/monitoring 3000:3000 &

Browse to http://localhost:3000/d/mIrc97CCz/zcash-testnet-in-a-box

Tail zcashd pod logs

To tail logs for the first zcash pod:

export pod1=$(kubectl get pods -l app=zcash-with-exporter  -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
export pod2=$(kubectl get pods -l app=zcash-with-exporter  -o jsonpath="{.items[1].metadata.name}")
kubectl logs -f $pod1 -c zcashd-script

Tail zcashd-peer logs

kubectl logs -f -l app=zcashd-peers

Zcash RPCs

To run a zcash RPC on $pod1:

kubectl exec -ti $pod1 -c zcashd-script -- bash
${HOME}/workspace/source/src/zcash-cli -rpcpassword=${ZCASHD_RPCPASSWORD} getinfo

See https://zcash-rpc.github.io/ for a list current of Zcash RPCs

Scaling Pods

As the nodes are modified with their given zcash.confs, users can scale pods to add more peers to the cluster:

kubectl scale --replicas=4 deploy/zcash-tnb-bundle

This will create 4 pods in the cluster. This can scale up to N pods depending on your system resources.

Using Lens IDE

An alternative tool to interact with the cluster is Lens (https://k8slens.dev/):

wget https://github.com/lensapp/lens/releases/download/v3.5.1/Lens-3.5.1.AppImage
chmod +x Lens-3.5.1.AppImage
sudo mv Lens-3.5.1.AppImage /usr/sbin/lens

Once installed successfully, start Lens and select the cluster from the 'Add clusters' + button in the IDE. This will allow you to interact with the pods from a dashboard. This can be useful when a developer needs to view logs and debug information, for a given set of pods.

Creating custom bundles

Depending on your network needs, you will likely have a few different zcash.confs to simulate miners and other nodes. For details of what goes into a bundle see: https://github.com/zcash-hackworks/zcash-testnet-in-a-box/blob/master/docs/BUILD-zcashd-tnb-artifacts.md