Aleph Core Channel Node (CCN)

Next generation network of decentralized cloud applications. Development follows the Aleph Whitepaper.

Documentation

Albeit still incomplete as it is a work in progress, documentation can be found at http://pyaleph.readthedocs.io/ or built from this repository with $ python setup.py docs.

Deployment

We recommend following the Installing a Core Channel Node section of the documentation to install a node.

Development

Do you want to contribute to the development of the CCN? Here is the procedure to install the development environment. We recommend using Ubuntu 20.04.

1. Install dependencies

sudo apt install python3 python3-pip python3-venv build-essential libsnappy-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libgflags-dev liblz4-dev libgmp-dev libsecp256k1-dev

2. Install Python requirements

Clone the repository and run the following commands from the root directory:

python3 -m virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .[testing,docs]

You're ready to go!

Developer setup using Nix

We started to add Nix as an easy way to setup a development environment. This is still a work in progress and not all dependencies are covered yet.

To use it, you need to have Nix installed on your system. Then you can run:

nix-shell

This will provide you with a shell with PostgreSQL, Redis, and IPFS running.

Test

To run test you can run:

nix-shell --run "hatch run testing:test"

Or you can run the command in the nix shell:

nix-shell

# inside of nix shell
hatch run testing:test

Run tests locally

Running tests locally requires setting up a local test environment through Docker Compose. From the root of the project, run the following commands to start the environment:

# Copy the template config file for local development
cp deployment/docker-build/config.yml .
# Start the environment
docker-compose -f deployment/docker-build/docker-compose.yml up -d

Once the environment is up, you can simply run tests from your IDE or from the command line:

pytest -v .

Software used

The Aleph CCN is written in Python and requires Python v3.12+. It will not work with older versions of Python.

It also relies on IPFS.

License

The Aleph CCN is open-source software, released under The MIT License (MIT).