external_geth shim

This shim is an example of how to write an adapter for an external ethereum client to allow for its use in the op-e2e tests.

Invocation

Generally speaking, you can utilize this shim by simply executing:

make test-external-geth

The Makefile is structured such that if you duplicate this directory and tweak this code, you may simply execute:

make test-external-<your-client>

and the execution should happen as well.

NOTE: Attempting to iterate for development requires explicit rebuilding of the binary being shimmed. Most likely to accomplish this, you may want to add initialization code to the TestMain of the e2e to build your binary, or use some other technique like custom build scripts or IDE integrations which cause the binary to be rebuilt before executing the tests.

Arguments

--config The config path is a required argument, it points to a JSON file that contains details of the L2 environment to bring up (including the genesis.json path, the chain ID, the JWT path, and a ready file path). See the data structures in op-e2e/external/config.go for more details.

Operation

This shim will first execute a process to initialize the op-geth database. Then, it will start the op-geth process itself. It watches the output of the process and looks for the lines indicating that the HTTP server and Auth HTTP server have started up. It then reads the ports which were allocated (because the requested ports were passed in as ephemeral via the CLI arguments).

Skipping tests

Although ideally, all tests would be structured such that they may execute either with an in-process op-geth or with an extra-process ethereum client, this is not always the case. You may optionally create a test_parms.json file in the external_<your-client> directory, as there is in the external_geth directory which specifies a map of tests to skip, and accompanying skip text. See the op-e2e/external/config.go file for more details.

Generalization

This shim is included to help document and demonstrates the usage of the external ethereum process e2e test execution. It is configured to execute in CI to help ensure that the tests remain compatible with external clients.

To create your own external test client, these files can likely be used as a starting point, changing the arguments, log scraping, and other details. Or, depending on the client and your preference, any binary which is capable of reading and writing the necessary JSON files should be sufficient (though will be required to replicate some of the parsing and other logic encapsulated here).