Neo-Halite
Overview
Welcome. Neo-Halite is a suite of tools designed to make the Neo Smart Economy easier to use.
- Rest, RPC, and Desktop Control Surfaces
- One-click Private Net
- One-click Deployment
- Multi-user Options - Join or build a collective.
- Orchestration
The project is made up of many moving parts, but we only want you to worry about one. Neo-Halite is your portal to the Neo Smart Economy development universe.
Plan
Private Net Orchestration System Draft v1 based on concept codename Neodymium. This plan is largely based off of the requirements set out by City of Zion in the following section.
Instant Neo Private Net and Orchestration
Goals
- Provide developers a "download-and-double-click" solution to deploy a Neo private net
- Make system completely GUI-based with no CLI knowledge required to operate
- Design modern and attractive UI to show Neo's tooling
- Provide UX with easy transition for users migrating from Ethereum/Ganache
- Easy integration with other Neo tools like neo-python or neocompiler.io
Technology
- Node.js
- Electron
- React
- Redux
- Sails.js
- Neon-js
- Neo-One and the TypeScript NeoVM implementation
- Neotracker
Feature List (From City of Zion Project Requirements)
- Must Have
- Quickstart
- Accounts browser
- Blocks browser
- Transactions browser
- Logs/Notifications browser
- Neoscan-compatible API (required for Neon-js)
- Neo-cli compatible RPC API
- Contracts browser
- Dynamic update support
- Should Have
- One-click chain reset
- Blocks created on-demand
- Nice to Have
- Multiple workspace configurations
- Contract storage browser
- Simple chain export and sharing
Build strict Orchestration requirements
- Determine additional modules for control, if needed, and if RPC can run everything alone
- Integrate RPC control module
- Integrate command line control module (if needed)
Build Presentation Framework (front-end)
Currently running:
- Electron
- This is the only working option right now even thought react is supported. Native system access is required to control Sailsjs server component with Electronjs main process.
- React
- Partially supported; front-end works, but React cannot bypass chrome sandbox to start server piece.
- Webpack
TODO: Add build flags to control server deployment and front-end options.
Server Framework Goals
Sailsjs is used on the backend to facilitate everything necessary for Neo privatenet abstraction: database, REST, RPC, and core node network.
-
Sailsjs
Wrap RPC, REST, and Database in Sailsjs routes. These routes should be strictly version controlled while the adapter layer could leverage the underlying modules for Neo-One, NeoTracker, etc directly, through IPC, by process spawn, or any other mechanism. It is preferred to directly implement the underlying modules for the tightest integration.
-
Localhost-only By Default
Dynamic port determination to front-end checks if port use that conflicts with any system feature and notifies the user to offer an easy solution to fix. Either stop the port and change to another at install time or dynamically allocate new ones.
Future: Allow easy configuration to expose services to the world. See next section.
-
Modular, Configurable, and Movable
Plan for cases where users want to scale to devs or devs want to scale to services. They can build anything they can imagine on this function primitive. This project should be the base for all derived work.
-
Database Agnostic
The system will wrap existing Neo Smart Economy technology for data like NeoTracker and Neo-One, but easy portability to other formats or databases would be ideal. This is enabled by capability to use Sailsjs schema abstraction to easily port any chains to any databases.
Server Framework Detail
This section is for control surfaces (RPC, REST, Database APIs).
At this time, it looks like most of the system control is done via command line and process management that is OS-specific.
Systems that we need to control:
- Neotracker https://github.com/neotracker/
- Neo-One https://github.com/neo-one-suite/neo-one
- @neo-one/client
- @neo-one/smart-contract
- Neo-One-Playground
- Neo network RPC control via neo-tools RPC module These have been tested with neo-tools
- grpc controls?
Install Software
yarn
Manual Server Software Installation
The standard build uses Sailjs as a localhost server. Before you can lift sails you will need to install the software requirements for Sails manually like so.
cd server
yarn
Test by doing sails lift and then browse to localhost:2328.
TODO: What should be on the page if you browse directly to the Sailsjs back-end?
- service status
- service manager / admin login
- branding and reference
- interface to decouple service from the front-end in the form of a deployment package along with instructions on how to point the front-end to it
Server Configuration Notes
Default Server Port
To modify the Sailjs server port that is used when starting Sails from Electron, for now, you will have to edit public/electron.js and change the variable serverPort.
TODO: Server service configuration option should be able to control this directly from the Electron front-end.
For sails lift, edit server/.sailsrc and change the port configuration variable.
Development
Run an interactive dev version packaged with Electron.
yarn dev
Rebuild Server Binaries with Electron Compatibility
If you start Sails and see errors about sqlite3 and/or grpc, do the following to build compatible binaries for Electron.
yarn electron-rebuild-bins
Build
Only build the software. Do not package it.
yarn prepack or yarn build
Create the Package
To build and package a distribution file with Electron and send it to the ./dist/ folder do:
yarn package
Run or Install the Package
The following should be suitable to install on Linux. This has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04
cd ./dist
./neo-halite\ 0.1.0.AppImage
For complete installation on Ubuntu 18.04 Linux to default directory /opt/ use:
cd ./dist
sudo dpkg -i neo-halite_0.1.0_amd64.deb
sudo chown -R youruser.youruser /opt/neo-halite/
TODO: Add post-install Debian script to chown post-intsall. See https://www.electron.build/configuration/linux
TODO: Develop and test Windows installer code TODO: Develop and test macOS installer code
Clean
Delete the ./dist/ folder. This can grow quite large.
yarn clean
Errors
If during the course of development on Linux you should encounter an error along the lines of the following please check the instructions at the link below.
Error: ENOSPC
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22475849/node-js-what-is-enospc-error-and-how-to-solve?lq=1
Todo
Create project board for the following:
Architecture
There are two main portions of neo-halite, the server, and the client. The system was designed this way to support modular deployment and separation from a singular, full-client installation to easily facilitate development decision use-cases for the users and developers that build on the codebase.
Server
The server tightly integrates with neo-one providing API routes to control a neo-one instance: starting, stopping, status, and network data like contracts, events, accounts, blocks, transactions, etc are available.
For status and planning of the server component please see: Server README.md
Client
The client or front end is the user interface that tightly couples with the server and focuses on presenting those server controls to the user.
State
(front-end)
- Add state management with redux before the prop passing and state lifting gets out of hand
UI Components
- Componentize network status button overlay flyout
- Abstract nav away from vertical/horizontal
- Event-driven flyout states
- I.e., clicking hamburger doesn't close session status automatically
- Ideally, this could be configurable flag
- Main UI panes do not scroll independently, consider best approach i.e., add scroll or not
UI Design
- Theme - the current UI design and layout was for testing and example
- Dark Mode
- Flex nav flyout