Concordium Client

Concordium Client

Introduction

Concordium Client is a command line tool for interacting with a Concordium node.

The tool has commands to

deploy, initialize, and interact with smart contracts,
view and manage local configurations such as aliases for accounts, modules and contracts,
query data from the chain,
query the state of the consensus protocol, and
inspect and manage the node.

For more information, please read our documentation.

Binary distributions are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Prerequisites

To build the tool from source, you need the following prerequisites:

Install the Haskell tool Stack:
- Via GHCup:
  - Unix: curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://get-ghcup.haskell.org | sh
  - Windows: Follow the GHCup install guide.
- Or, by itself:
  - Unix: curl -sSL https://get.haskellstack.org/ | sh
  - Windows: Follow the Stack install guide.
Install Rust version 1.68+:
- Unix: curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
- Windows: Follow the Rust install guide
  - Use the x86_64-pc-windows-gnu toolchain by choosing it during installation or by running rustup toolchain default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu.
- Recommended after installing: Set the default Rust version to 1.68 by running rustup default 1.68.
Install the protoc tool for generating protobuf files:
- MacOS: brew install protobuf
- Ubuntu 19.10: sudo apt install protobuf-compiler
- Windows: stack exec -- pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-protobuf
Install development libraries for PostgreSQL:
- MacOS: brew install postgresql
- Ubuntu 19.10: sudo apt install libpq-dev postgresql-common
- Windows: stack exec -- pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-postgresql
Initialize submodule dependencies after cloning (git submodule update --init --recursive).

Build

stack build

MacOS Specific

You may need to add the following entries to your ~/.stack/config.yaml for the libraries installed via brew:

extra-lib-dirs:
- /opt/homebrew/lib

extra-include-dirs:
- /opt/homebrew/include/

M1 MacOS Specific

You may need to add the following entry to your ~/.stack/config.yaml for the libffi include:

extra-include-dirs:
- /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX12.3.sdk/usr/include/ffi/

To determine the exact path to the libffi include directory, run the following command:

pkg-config --cflags libffi

Usage

Run using stack run concordium-client -- [BACKEND] COMMAND [ARGS...], where

BACKEND specifies the node to target with the commands. This is specified using the --grpc-ip, --grpc-port, and --grpc-target options (where the latter might be needed when calling through a proxy like, say, on the testnet). The IP-address must belong to a node running with the GRPC API V2 enabled and served on the specified port.
COMMAND is a command from one of the categories described below in Commands.
ARGS is the list of arguments provided to COMMAND.

Whenever a command takes an optional --block parameter, it always defaults to the current "best" block.

For detailed and up to date descriptions of the commands and arguments, please read our documentation, or use the --help flag in the tool.

Commands

The commands are grouped by topic.

transaction
- Commands for sending transactions and querying their status.
account
- Commands for inspecting and modifying accounts on the chain. Local configuration can be modified via config account ....
module
- Commands for deploying and inspecting smart contract modules.
contract
- Commands for initializing, interacting with and inspecting smart contract instances.
config
- Commands for inspecting and changing local configuration. In particular regarding accounts and their names. Names for smart contract modules and contracts are handled in module and contract, respectively. For more information, read the section on Configuration below.
consensus
- Commands for inspecting the chain health (branching and finalization), baker election and statistics, and reward/minting parameters.
block
- Commands for inspecting individual blocks.
baker
- Commands for managing your baker. Including the creation and deployment of baker credentials.
identity
- Commands for viewing information about identity providers and anonymity revokers.
raw
- Commands that correspond directly to the node's API. Most of these commands have non-raw alternatives which are more polished and thus should be preferred.

Concepts and configuration

"Best" block

Commands that operate on a specific block default to the "best" block if the parameter is omitted.

There is a bit of a race condition in the way this best block is queried: To get the best block, we make a call, and then we need a separate call to get the block info. In the meantime, however, the best block could have been pruned due to finalization.

Account aliases

concordium-client can generate aliases of addresses. An alias for an address can be generated with

concordium-client account show-alias ACCOUNT --alias N

where ACCOUNT is either a name of the account or an account address, and N is an integer between 0 and 16777215 (inclusive) (the integer can also be specified in hex). For example

concordium-client account show-alias 4oM1reP5hVqT8Krvb9c1bJffoWW4ChTYDZVmbJwGtfGpGcDo5v --alias 0x010203

There is support for sending transactions via an alias of an account. Each transaction that creates a transaction supports an --alias option which generates an alias for the sender address and uses it when sending transactions instead of the given address. The --alias option has the same meaning as to the account show-alias command.

Configuration

Accounts, keys, module- and contract-names may be stored in config files on disk to avoid having to pass it as command line options. The config directory can be specified with the --config PATH option and defaults to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/concordium. The variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME is defined by the XDG standard as the location of user specific configuration. If not set or empty, it has the following system-dependent defaults:

Unix: $HOME/.config
Windows: %APPDATA% (C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming)

The expected structure inside the config directory is

<configDir>
├── accounts
│   ├── <account1>             # One folder per account.
│   │   ├── <credId1>          # And one folder per credential per account.
│   │   │   └── keypair0.json
│   │   └── encSecretKey.json
│   ├── <account2>
│   │   ├── <credId2>
│   │   │   ├── keypair0.json
│   │   │   ├── keypair1.json
│   │   │   └── keypair2.json
│   │   └── encSecretKey.json
│   └── names.map              # Mapping from account name to addresses.
└── contracts
       ├── contractNames.map   # Mapping from contract name to contract addresses.
       └── moduleNames.map     # Mapping from module names to module references.

There are three types for name aliases used in Concordium Client.

Account names:
- A mapping from account names to account addresses.
Contract names:
- A mapping from contract names to contract addresses.
Module names:
- A mapping from module names to module references.

The names may be used in place of the address/reference they are referring to. The tool will then look up and use the address or reference with that name. Note that the name maps are only consulted once and only if the provided address/reference is invalid. So the maps cannot be used to map address->address, reference->reference, or name->name.

The tool will use the special account name default if an account is needed but not provided.

Contributing

To contribute create a new branch from main, make changes, and make a pull request. A person familiar with the codebase should be asked to review the changes before they are merged.

For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

Feel free to check our issues-page.

License

This project is licensed under Apache 2.0.

Concordium / concordium-client