Connext Architecture

The Connext architecture can be seen as a layered system, as follows.

Layer	Protocol/Stakeholders
`Application Layer`	`Crosschain Applications (xApps), SDK`
`Liquidity Layer`	`Routers, Sequencer`
`Messaging - Execution Layer`	`Lighthouse, Sequencer`
`Messaging - Verification Layer`	`Watcher`
`Messaging - Transport Layer`	`AMBs`

About Connext

Connext is a modular stack for trust-minimized, generalized communication between blockchains. Read More

Architecture

adapters - Wrappers around external modules. These adapters can be shared between different packages.
- Cache is a wrapper around all the redis based caches that are used.
- Database is implementation of schema and client for the database.
- Subrgaph includes graphclient implementation and reader functions for subgraph.
- TxService resiliently attempts to send transactions to chain (with retries, etc.) and is used to read and write to RPC providers, and has fallback providers if needed. Fallbacks can be defined as arrays and this way we can provide resiliency in case of failure
- Web3Signer is a wrapper around Web3Signer, which is a secure way of signing which does not require to include mnemonics in the app itself.
agents - Core infra Hosted services for Functionality and UX.
- Cartographer is our chain indexer, which indexes from subgraph and provides an API to query raw and computed data.
- Lighthouse is an implementation for execution layer.
- Relayer is an implementation of a relayer in case we can't use Gelato
- Router - listens for events from messaging service and subgraph, and then dispatches transactions to txService
- SDK - is a JS wrapper around the contract calls themselves and can be used by integrations
- Sequencer - is the agent module which is in charge of sourcing bids from routers and puts fast liquidity bids onto the chain itself.
deployments
- Contracts - Contracts are the contracts that we deploy and the deployment scripts
- Subgraph is all the subgraph source code to define all the mappings and contains all the configurations to deploy to different graph hosted services or third party graph providers
examples - these are not used in production, but contains ways to use the SDK that are illustrative of how to integrate Connext
integration - Utilities for integration test
utils - Collection of helper functions that are shared throughout the different packages

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First time setup

Use Node version 18.x. And Make sure you are on the latest yarn version:

yarn set version berry

To set up the containers, use Docker. If Docker is not already installed on your system, you can easily install it by clicking here.

Try running yarn to update everything. If you have issues, try deleting node_modules and yarn.lock. After deleting yarn.lock run touch yarn.lock since it does not like if there is no lock file.

Dev Environment

Setup Environment, by initiating the build:

yarn && yarn build:all

Here yarn: Install deps, create symlinks, hoist packages. & yarn build:all: Build all packages.

To run RabbitMQ with the management plugin using Docker, run the following command:

docker run -it --rm --name rabbitmq -p 5672:5672 -p 15672:15672 rabbitmq:3.10-management

This command will download the latest RabbitMQ image with the management plugin and start a container with the name rabbitmq.

To run Redis, execute the following command:

docker run -it --rm --name redis -p 6379:6379 redis

This command will download the latest Redis image and start a container with the name redis.

And now you are all ready to interact with Monorepo.

Individual commands can be run against workspaces as so (example for nxtp-utils package):

yarn workspace @connext/nxtp-utils test

You should be able to do everything from the root and not need to go into the individual package dirs. For example, adding an npm package:

yarn workspace @connext/nxtp-txservice add ethers

Run router:

yarn workspace @connext/nxtp-router dev - Runs router in hot-reload mode.

Running Test

yarn: Install deps, create symlinks, hoist packages.
yarn build:all: Build all packages. or
yarn workspace @connext/smart-contracts build: Build the specific package.

Run test:

yarn workspace @connext/smart-contracts test - Runs test.

Adding Packages

To add a new package that can be shared by the rest of the repo, you can use some convenience scripts that we have installed:

yarn tsp create @connext/test-lib --template node-lib

Note: The tsp tool is not required, it just makes boilerplate generation easier. If you want, you can copy paste stuff from other packages. Documentation on the tool is here.

To add the lib to be a dependency of a consuming app (i.e. the router):

yarn tsp add @connext/test-lib --cwd packages/router

Again, this can all be done without the tool, all it does is add some files and make some config changes.

Note: We use node-lib as the template for all the packages. There are some other included templates like browser-lib which didn't work with our bundling. We might need to revisit things for bundling reqs.

Publishing Packages

Update the CHANGELOG.md.
Run yarn version:all X.X.X where X.X.X is the full version string of the NPM version to deploy (i.e. 0.0.1).
- Use X.X.X-beta.N for Amarok releases from production branch and X.X.X-alpha.N for Amarok releases from main branch.
Commit and add a tag matching the version: git commit -am "<version>" && git tag -am "<version>"
Run git push --follow-tags.
The GitHub action will publish the packages by recognizing the version tag.

Contributing

Contributions are what makes the open source community such an amazing place to learn, inspire, and create. Any contributions you make are greatly appreciated.

If you have a suggestion that would make this better, please fork the repo and create a pull request. You can also simply open an issue with the tag "enhancement". Don't forget to give the project a star! Thanks again!