substrate-contracts-node

This repository contains Substrate's node-template configured to include Substrate's pallet-contracts ‒ a smart contract module.

This repository contains a couple of modifications that make it unsuitable for a production deployment, but a great fit for development and testing:

• The unstable features of the pallet-contracts are enabled by default (see the runtime/Cargo.toml).
• The consensus algorithm has been switched to manual-seal in #42. Hereby blocks are authored immediately at every transaction, so there is none of the typical six seconds block time associated with grandpa or aura.
  • By default, either manual or instant seal does not result in block finalization unless the engine_finalizeBlock RPC is executed. However, it is possible to configure the finalization of sealed blocks to occur after a certain amount of time by setting the --finalize-delay-sec option to a specific value, which specifies the number of seconds to delay before finalizing the blocks. The default value is 1 second.

    ./target/release/substrate-contracts-node --finalize-delay-sec 5

• If no CLI arguments are passed the node is started in development mode by default.
• A custom logging filter is applied by default that hides block production noise and prints the contracts debug buffer to the console.
• With each start of the node process the chain starts from genesis ‒ so no chain state is retained, all contracts will be lost! If you want to retain chain state you have to supply a --base-path.
• For pallet_contracts::Config we increased the allowed contract sizes. This avoids running into CodeTooLarge when uploading contracts during development. See the comment in runtime/src/lib.rs for more details.

If you are looking for a node suitable for production see these configurations:

• Substrate Node Template
• Substrate Cumulus Parachain Template
• Contracts Parachain Configuration for Rococo

Installation

Download Binary

The easiest way is to download a binary release from our releases page and just execute ./substrate-contracts-node.

Build Locally

Follow the official installation steps to set up all Substrate prerequisites.

Afterwards you can install this node via

cargo install contracts-node

Usage

To run a local dev node execute

substrate-contracts-node

A new chain in temporary directory will be created each time the command is executed. This is the default for this node. If you want to persist chain state across runs you need to specify a directory with --base-path.

See our FAQ for more details: How do I print something to the console from the runtime?.

Connect with frontend

Once the node template is running locally, you can connect to it with frontends like Contracts UI or Polkadot-JS Apps and interact with your chain.

How to upgrade to new Polkadot release

Note: Now that this repo has upgraded to using dependencies from crates.io, this section needs to be updated to reflect the new process, once the first release of the crates from the new polkadot-sdk mono-repo happens

• Check Substrate's node-template for new commits between the new polkadot release branch and the one this repository is currently synced with. The current branch is mentioned in this readme.
• Apply each commit that happened in this node-template folder since the last sync.
• Check commits for pallet-contracts since the last time someone synchronized this repository with Substrate in order to not miss any important changes.
• Execute diener update -s --branch my_polkadot_release_branch. Manually upgrade the pallet-assets-chain-extension dependency to the latest release branch and then cargo update -p pallet-contracts for this repository. The specific crate which is mentioned here is actually not important: since Substrate uses git references for its Substrate dependencies it means that once one package is updated all are.
• Increment the minor version number in node/Cargo.toml and runtime/Cargo.toml.
• Execute cargo run --release. If successful, it should produce blocks and a new, up to date, Cargo.lock will be created.
• Update this readme with the hash of the Substrate master commit with which you synchronized. The hash appears two times in this readme.
• Create a PR with the changes, have it reviewed and merged.
• Replace XX in this command with your incremented version number and execute it: git checkout main && git pull && git tag v0.XX.0 && git push origin v0.XX.0. This will push a new tag with the version number to this repository.
• We have set this repository up in a way that tags à la vX.X.X trigger a CI run that creates a GitHub draft release. You can observe CI runs on GitLab. This draft release will contain a binary for Linux and Mac and appear under Releases. Add a description in the style of "Synchronized with polkadot-v1.0.0 branch." and publish it.