Status Documentation

Build status-go

Introduction

status-go is an underlying part of Status. It heavily depends on go-ethereum which is forked and slightly modified by us.

The project output can take several forms:

A cross-platform static library providing Status bindings for go-ethereum, ready to be used in other Go projects, or in status-react through cgo.

NOTE: Normally status-react uses a precompiled version of status-go, but you can build a custom version of status-go to include in status-react (see how-to in Build Status Yourself);
A command line interface, which can be used to run a full, LES or ULC node, with support for Whisper mailserver functionality;
A command line tool to test availability of a given Whisper mailserver (used to check uptime of the Status cluster).

Build status-go

1. Requirements

Go version 1.10;
Set GOPATH;
Docker (only if cross-compiling).

2. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/status-im/status-go
cd status-go

3. Set up build environment

status-go uses Makefile to perform the most common actions. See make help output for available commands.

The first thing to do to get started is to run make setup. That’ll ensure that all tools required to do a first build are installed and set up.

make setup

This script prepares and installs the following:

4. Build the statusd CLI

To get started, let’s build the Ethereum node Command Line Interface tool, called statusd.

make statusgo

Once that is completed, you can run it straight away with a default configuration by running

build/bin/statusd

Node configuration

Passing the -h flag will output all the possible flags used to configure the tool. Although the tool can be used with default configuration, you’ll probably want to delve into the configuration and modify it to your needs.

Node configuration - be it through the CLI or as a static library - is done through JSON files following a precise structure. At any point, you can add the -version argument to statusd to get an output of the JSON configuration in use. You can pass multiple configuration files which will be applied in the order in which they were specified.

There are a few standard configuration files located in the config/cli folder to get you started. For instance you can pass -c les-enabled.json to enable LES mode.

Typical modes to run a node

As a Whisper mail server:

{
    "WhisperConfig": {
        "Enabled": true,
        "EnableMailServer": true,

        // Set LightClient to true if the node should start with an empty bloom filter and not forward messages from other nodes
        "LightClient": false,

        // Set either a password or an asymmetric encryption key (hex encoded) to use to decrypt incoming Whisper requests
        "MailServerPassword": "",
        "MailServerAsymKey": ""
    }
}

As a LES node:

{
    "LightEthConfig": {
        "Enabled": true
    }
}

5. Build a static library

make statusgo-library

This command will build a status-go library for the host platform under build/bin/libstatus.a. You can also cross compile for different platforms using the appropriate make commands, e.g. make statusgo-android, make statusgo-linux, etc. These will be built in a Docker container using xgo, which can be obtained by running make xgo.

6. Build a bootnode

A bootnode is a regular Ethereum node which runs only discovery (DevP2P is disabled). It is used as a first connection point for Ethereum nodes to discover other peers in the network.

One reason you might want to run a bootnode build instead of a node with LES/Whisper enabled, is that it will be more forgiving in terms of version mismatches, as discovery happens on a different layer.

make bootnode

The output program will be available in build/bin/bootnode.

Debugging

IDE Debugging

If you’re using Visual Studio Code, you can rename the .vscode/launch.example.json file to .vscode/launch.json so that you can run the statusd server with the debugger attached.

Android debugging

In order to see the log files while debugging on an Android device, do the following:

Ensure that the app can write to disk by granting it file permissions. For that, you can for instance set your avatar from a file on disk.
Connect a USB cable to your phone and make sure you can use adb.

Run

adb shell tail -f sdcard/Download/geth.log

Testing

To setup accounts passphrase you need to setup an environment variable: export ACCOUNT_PASSWORD="secret_pass_phrase".

To test fully status-go, use:

make ci

To test statusgo using a given network by name, use:

make ci networkid=rinkeby

To test statusgo using a given network by number ID, use:

make ci networkid=3

If you have problems running tests on public network we suggest reading e2e guide.

If you want to launch specific test, for instance RPCSendTransactions, use the following command:

go test -v ./api/ -testify.m ^RPCSendTransaction$

Note -testify.m as testify/suite is used to group individual tests.