Run Local Testnet

Overview

In this tutorial, we’re going to set up a development environment. We are going to deploy a full stack of the core blockchain and connect the Web UI to the blockchain. By the end of the tutorial, you will be able to:

Send confidential Commands and Queries
Get a ready-to-hack version of Phala Network for building your confidential DApps

A full Phala Network stack has three components, with an optional Javascript SDK. The core components are available at Phala-Network/phala-blockchain:

phala-node: The Substrate blockchain node
pRuntime: The TEE runtime. Contracts run in pRuntime
pherry: The Substrate-TEE bridge relayer. Connects the blockchain and pRuntime

The Javascript SDK is at Phala-Network/js-sdk. The Web UI based on our SDK needs to connect to both the blockchain and the pRuntime to send Commands and Queries.

Setting up

In this tutorial, we assume the operating system is Ubuntu 22.04. Other Linux distributions should also work, but the instructions or commands may vary. 4 cores and 8GB RAM is the minimal requirement to build the project including the core blockchain.

Build from source

The Phala-Network/phala-blockchain repository always contains the latest build instructions, at the time of writing (December 26, 2022), we use the following commands to set up development environment:

# First clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Phala-Network/phala-blockchain.git
# Change to the repository directory
cd phala-blockchain
# Install system dependencies:
sudo apt install -y build-essential pkg-config libssl-dev protobuf-compiler
# Install Rust
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
# Install dependencies for Substrate development
git submodule update --init
sh ./scripts/init.sh
# Installl LLVM 14
wget https://apt.llvm.org/llvm.sh
chmod +x llvm.sh
./llvm.sh 14

Then run the following command to build the Phala blockchain:

cargo build --release

It takes approximately 20 minutes to complete the building process on a laptop equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 4700U processor with 8 cores, 8 threads, and 32GB of RAM.

Start the local testnet

We have a dedicate set of scripts to get the blockchain to run, checkout out this page for full details. For simplicity we can start as simple as follows:

We might want to clean up runtime data to have to clean starting environment, from the root of the phala-blockchain project, run this to clean things up:

./scripts/run/clear-pruntime.sh

Then go ahead and run these 3 commands in 3 separate terminals:

./scripts/run/node.sh
./scripts/run/pruntime.sh
./scripts/run/pherry.sh

Now you have a full node at ws://localhost:19944, and the pruntime is at http://localhost:18000.

After you start the node and the pruntime, you need set up Phat Contract environment once. This can be done with our phala-blockchain-setup repo:

git clone https://github.com/shelvenzhou/phala-blockchain-setup.git
cd phala-blockchain-setup
yarn

ENDPOINT=ws://localhost:19944 \
WORKERS=http://localhost:18000 \
GKS=http://localhost:18000 \
yarn setup:drivers

After all, you testnet is ready. You can continue with the Connect the polkadot app to the local testnet section.

Alternatively, use devPHAse

Our community has an excellent tool to automate the setup process, developed by 100k, it is like the Phala version of Hardhat or Truffle.

Run the following commands to create a devPHAse project:

# create a new project, or skip it if you already have one
yarn init
# Add devPHAse to the project
yarn add -D @devphase/cli
yarn add -D typescript ts-node
# Init project
yarn devphase init

Then start the local testnet with:

yarn devphase stack run

Open a separate terminal, run the following command to setup the local testnet:

yarn devphase stack:setup

By default you get the Phala blockchain node at ws://localhost:9944 and the pruntime at http://localhost:8000, you can change the configuration at devphase.config.ts, for more details check out the devPHAse repository

Connect the Phat UI to the local testnet

We have a client-side application at https://phat.phala.network/, you can follow the instructions that connect the application to the local testnet.

As the above figure shows, we first click the green dot at the upper-right cornor to set the RPC Endpoint to ws://localhost:19944, or ws://localhost:9944 if you start the chain via the devPHAse approach, and change the PRuntime field accordingly.

Don’t forget to claim some Test-PHAs, they’re required to deploy Phat Contracts and send transactions.

Connect the polkadot app to the local testnet

Open up https://polkadot.js.org/apps, click the upper-left corner to call forth the endpoint setup menu:

Set the field custom endpoint to ws://localhost:9944 and then click the switch button to connect to it.

Congratulations! Now you have a fully qualified local development environment!