TEZOS

Tezos is a distributed consensus platform with meta-consensus capability. Tezos not only comes to consensus about state, like BTC or ETH. It also comes to consensus about how the protocol and the nodes should adapt and upgrade.

See https://www.tezos.com/ for more information about the project.

Build instructions

To compile Tezos, you need an OCaml compiler (version 4.03.0) and all the libraries listed in src/tezos-deps.opam.

The best way to install all dependencies is by first installing OPAM, the OCaml package manager.

Create a new switch alias for Tezos. A switch is your own version of the OPAM configuration, including the OCaml compiler, all packages, and package manager configuration related to your project. This is necessary so that the project doesn't conflict with other OCaml projects or other versions of Tezos.

opam switch tezos --alias-of 4.03.0

Activate the new switch:

eval `opam config env`

Install Tezos dependencies:

make build-deps

Compile the project:

make

This should produce three binaries:

• tezos-node: the tezos daemon itself;
• tezos-client: a minimal command-line client;
• tezos-protocol-compiler: a protocol compiler used for developing new version of the economical protocol.

Currently Tezos is being developed for Linux only. It should work on mac OS, but it has not been tested recently. A Windows port is in progress.

Running the node in a sandbox

To run a single instance of a Tezos node in sandbox mode:

./tezos-node --sandbox /path/to/a/custom/data/dir --rpc-addr :::8732

This "sandboxed" node will not participate in the P2P network, but will accept RPC from localhost on port 8732. See below from more details on the RPC interface.

Running the node

So far there is no official Tezos network being run, but you might run a local test network. Use the following command to run a node that will accept incoming connections:

./tezos-node

The node will listen to connections coming in on 0.0.0.0:9732 (and [::]:9732). All used data is stored at $HOME/.tezos-node/. For example, the default configuration file is at $HOME/.tezos-node/config.

To run multiple nodes on the same machine, you can duplicate and edit $HOME/.tezos-node/config while making sure they don't share paths to the database or any other data file (cf. options db.store ; db.context ; net.peers and protocol.dir).

You could also let Tezos generate a config file by specifying options on the command line. For instance, if $dir/config does not exist, the following command will generate it and replace the default values with the values from the command line:

./tezos-node --base-dir "$dir" --net-addr 127.0.0.1:9733

The Tezos server has a built-in mechanism to discover peers on the local network (using UDP packets broadcasted on port 7732).

If this mechanism is not sufficient, one can provide Tezos with a list of initial peers, either by editing the option net.bootstrap.peers in the config file, or by specifying a command line parameter:

./tezos-node --base-dir "$dir" --net-addr 127.0.0.1:2023 \
             --peer 127.0.0.1:2021 --peer 127.0.0.1:2022

If "$dir"/config exists, the command line options override those read in the config file. Tezos won't modify the content of an existing "$dir"/config file.

./tezos-node --config-file "$dir"/config

JSON/RPC interface

The Tezos node provides a JSON/RPC interface. Note that it is an RPC, and it is JSON based, but it does not follow the "JSON-RPC" protocol. It is not active by default and it must be explicitely activated with the --rpc-addr option. Typically, if you are not trying to run a local network and just want to explore the RPC, you would run:

./tezos-node --sandbox /path/to/a/custom/data/dir --rpc-addr :::8732

The RPC interface is self-documented and the tezos-client executable is able to pretty-print the RPC API. For instance, to see the API provided by the Tezos Shell:

./tezos-client rpc list

To get API attached to the "genesis" block, including the remote procedures provided by the associated economical protocol version:

./tezos-client rpc list /blocks/genesis/

You might also want the JSON schema describing the expected input and output of a RPC. For instance:

./tezos-client rpc schema /block/genesis/hash

Note: you can get the same information, but as a raw JSON object, with a simple HTTP request:

wget --post-data '{ "recursive": true }' -O - http://127.0.0.1:8732/describe
wget --post-data '{ "recursive": true }' -O - http://127.0.0.1:8732/describe/blocks/genesis
wget -O - http://127.0.0.1:8732/describe/blocks/genesis/hash

The minimal CLI client

Work in progress.

See ./tezos-client -help for available commands.