Local Polkadot

Have you ever tried interacting with the Polkadot network using polkadot.js.org/apps and found it to be frustratingly slow?

Too much load on the rpc server can lead to a bad user experience.

Wish if there was a 1-click (or few keystrokes) worth of commands to quickly setup a local rpc-node + explorer and start submitting transactions or check the staking dashboard without lag?

Enter local-polkadot

Usually developers and power users run their own RPC node locally and also an instance of polkadot-js/apps to monitor chain activity and submit transactions with complete peace of mind.

This involves starting two terminals, compiling the polkadot binary locally, running it with the right options, then in a second terminal, opening polkadot-js explorer and running it to interact with the local chain running on port 9944.

local-polkadot does that for you!

It is intentionally kept simple so that you may audit the code for yourself and comes with a few options

Usage

Install it using cargo-install or compile it

cargo install local-polkadot

Run it

local-polkadot

And that's it! Visit http://localhost:3000/?rpc=ws%3A%2F%2F127.0.0.1%3A9944#/explorer in your browser and give it a couple of minutes to sync up with mainnet.

local-polkadot by default creates a directory called .local-polkadot in your home ($HOME) and downloads the latest polkadot and polkadot-js/apps releases. It then starts them both: polkadot on port 9944 and apps on port 3000. Use ctrl-c to terminate and clean up.

If you find yourself using local-polkadot often you'd want to keep your downloaded software updated.

This is where you use --fresh

local-polkadot --fresh

Would remove the $HOME/.local-polkadot folder, recreate it, and redownload the latest polkadot and apps source code.

You can also use local polkadot as local-polkadot --tmp to remove $HOME/.local-polkadot after you're done.

If you're already running an explorer, you might want to pass in --skip-pjs or --skip-polkadotjs which makes sure to only run the polkadot node and not the explorer

More about local-polkadot

This tool does nothing new that couldn't be done manually. I created this for myself as I found myself doing the steps manually many times.

If you don't want store artifacts in $HOME/.local-polkadot you're free to specify a --path where it will download its resources.

It specifically looks for files pjs.zip and polkadot in its working directory, finding which would result in skipping of download.

For now only polkadot is supported, but I plan on including support for kusama as well.

This tool works because warp sync a feature of polkadot and substrate built chains that allows it to quickly sync up with the main network by downloading finality proofs instead of whole blocks which would make this a tediously long exercise.

Here's the commands it executes internally : It uses some dependencies that are required on your system: unzip and yarn.

# For explorer
yarn install;
yarn run start;
# For Polkadot
polkadot --chain polkadot --sync warp --rpc-methods Safe --tmp --rpc-port 9944 --rpc-cors all ... # and a few more

To see what's new checkout the CHANGELOG