Etherchain Light

Lightweight blockchain explorer for your private Ethereum chain

Etherchain Light is an Ethereum blockchain explorer built with NodeJS, Express and Parity. It does not require an external database and retrieves all information on the fly from a backend Ethereum node.

While there are several excellent Ethereum blockchain explorers available (etherscan, ether.camp and etherchain) they operate on a fixed subset of Ethereum networks, usually the mainnet and testnet. Currently there are no network agnostic blockchain explorers available. If you want to develop Dapps on a private testnet or would like to launch a private / consortium network, Etherchain Light will allow you to quickly explore such chains.

Current Features

Browse blocks, transactions, accounts and contracts
View pending transactions
Display contract internal calls (call, create, suicide)
Upload & verify contract sources
Named accounts
Advanced transaction tracing (VM Traces & State Diff)

Planned features

ERC20 Token support
Signature verification
Load balanced HTTP JSON-RPC support
Contract state evaluation
Accounts enumeration
Submit Raw Transactions
Node status

Usage notes

This blockchain explorer is intended for private Ethereum chains. As it does not have a dedicated database all data will be retrived on demand from a backend Parity node. Some of those calls are ressource intensive (e.g. retrieval of the full tx list of an account) and do not scale well for acounts with a huge number of transactions. We currently develop the explorer using the Kovan testnet but it will work with every Parity compatible Ethereum network configuration. The explorer is still under heavy development, if you find any problems please create an issue or prepare a pull request.

Getting started

Supported OS: Ubuntu 16.04

Supported Ethereum backend nodes: Parity

Setup a nodejs & npm environment
Install the latest version of the Parity Ethereum client
Start parity using the following options: parity --chain=<yourchain> --tracing=on --fat-db=on --pruning=archive
Clone this repository to your local machine: git clone https://github.com/gobitfly/etherchain-light --recursive (Make sure to include --recursive in order to fetch the solc-bin git submodule)
Install all dependencies: npm install
Adjust the config.js file to your local environment
Start the explorer: npm start
Browse to http://localhost:3000