Iron Fish Tank

The Iron Fish Tank is a framework to simulate and test the Iron Fish ecosystem. With it, you can run arbitrarily large Iron Fish networks in an isolated environment, without affecting the Iron Fish MainNet or TestNet.

The Iron Fish Tank comes with a TypeScript SDK (meant to be used to write integration and acceptance tests) and a command line tool (meant to be used for manual experimentation and testing).

The Iron Fish Tank is currently under active development and is not intented for general use yet!

Quick start

1. Install Docker: The Iron Fish Tank needs Docker to run, so first of all you'll need to download and install Docker for your platform.

2. (Optional) Set necessary permissions to use Docker: On some platforms (most notably Linux), access to Docker is restricted by default and only the root user may interact with Docker. If you don't want to run the Iron Fish Tank as root, you may want to allow your user to access the Docker socket:

   setfacl -m u:$USER:rw /var/run/docker.sock

3. Check out and build the Iron Fish Tank repository:

   git clone https://github.com/iron-fish/ironfish-tank.git
   cd ironfish-tank
   yarn build

4. Start your first cluster:

   yarn start start cluster-name

   By doing so, the Iron Fish Tank will create a new isolated Docker network and spin up an Iron Fish bootstrap node. You can see the network via docker network ls and the container running the bootstrap node via docker container ls.

   Note that you can run multiple clusters in parallel: just make sure that you choose a different name every time.

5. Add some nodes:

   yarn start spawn --cluster cluster-name node-name

   This will start a new node in the cluster with the default configuration. The node will connect to the bootstrap node that was launched when the cluster was created. You can see the container running the node via docker container ls. You can also try out docker exec -i cluster-name_node-name ironfish peers to see what the node is connected to.

   See yarn start spawn --help have an overview of the options you can use to customize the node.

6. Tear down the cluster:

   yarn start stop cluster-name

   This will remove all containers, all networks, and all other resources that are part of the cluster.

Configuration

The following environment variables may be set to customize the behavior of simulations:

• FISHTANK_NODE_IMAGE: The Docker image to use to run Iron Fish Nodes. By default, this is ghcr.io/iron-fish/ironfish:latest

• FISHTANK_NODE_ARGS: Extra command-line arguments to add to the ironfish start command.

• FISHTANK_SCENARIOS_CLEANUP: Whether or not to remove resources created by the scenarios simulated by yarn simulate. By default, after each scenario is run, all resources (containers, virtual networks, files, ...) for that scenario are destroyed; this option may be set to true to keep all resources for later inspection.