Parity proof-of-stake test setup

This is an integration test of AuRa POSDAO with seven Parity nodes running locally.

Usage

To configure the repository and run tests, execute npm run all.

To test upgrading of an existing chain to posdao instead, run npm run all-upgrade.

Requirements

To integrate with parity-ethereum, the following structure of folders is assumed:

.
├── parity-ethereum
├── posdao-test-setup

So there should be two folders on the same level and posdao-test-setup will use parity binary from the parity-ethereum folder, namely the binary is assumed to be at ../parity-ethereum/target/release/parity relative to posdao-test-setup root.

If you are working on modifications of parity-ethereum or want to compile specific branch/version, you can clone it directly and build the binary

# move up from posdao-test-setup root
cd ..
git clone https://github.com/paritytech/parity-ethereum
cd parity-ethereum
#
# Next step assumes you have Rust and required dependencies installed,
# for details please check https://github.com/paritytech/parity-ethereum/blob/master/README.md
# Note that you can instruct Rust to always use the latest stable version for this project by running
#     $ rustup override set stable
# in `parity-ethereum` folder.
#
# Build the binary
cargo build --release --features final

To save time, you can download a pre-compiled binary from the releases page. But you still need to maintain directory structure and naming conventions:

# move up from posdao-test-setup root
cd ..
mkdir -p parity-ethereum/target/release/
curl -SfL 'https://releases.parity.io/ethereum/stable/x86_64-apple-darwin/parity' -o parity-ethereum/target/release/parity
chmod +x parity-ethereum/target/release/parity
# check that it works and version is correct (compare the version from the binary with version on the release page)
parity-ethereum/target/release/parity --version

This setup is backward compatible with our old v2.5.9 fork.

Development

Adding new validator nodes and their keys

To add a new validator node, Parity should generate an account together with its secret key like so:

parity account new --config config/nodeX.toml --keys-path parity-data/nodeX/keys

given a node configuration file config/nodeX.toml and a newly created directory parity-data/nodeX/keys. config/nodeX.toml should then be amended with the validator address output by the above command. Also, the keys directory parity-data/nodeX/keys should be committed to the Git repository: it is a part of persistent Parity state which should be kept across state resets which happen when you run npm run all.

With this done, the node can be added to the list of started nodes in scripts/start-test-setup and to the list of stopped nodes in scripts/stop-test-setup.

If the new node has to be an initial validator, the network spec should reflect that: add the node's address to INITIAL_VALIDATORS and STAKING_ADDRESSES in scripts/network-spec.

Simulation

We've created a NetLogo model for simulating the staking and rewards computation on networks of various sizes and having different input parameters.