Five Bells Ledger

A reference implementation of the Five Bells Ledger API

Usage

You can see the ledger in action as part of the five-bells-demo!

To run the ledger as a standalone server:

Step 1: Clone repo

git clone https://github.com/interledgerjs/five-bells-ledger.git
cd five-bells-ledger

Step 2: Install dependencies

npm install

Step 3: Run it!

To run it using an in-memory database (the simplest option), run:

LEDGER_ADMIN_PASS=mypassword LEDGER_DB_URI=sqlite://:memory: npm start

Or run:

npm start

See "Environment Variables" in the generated documentation for config options.

Building Docs

After installation:

npm run docs

Open apidocs-out/index.html in a web browser to see the generated API documentation.

Running with Docker (Alternative Method)

This project can be run in a Docker container.

You need to start a postgres container:

docker run --name five-bells-ledger-db -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password -d postgres

After giving postgres a few seconds to start up, you can run a five-bells-ledger Docker container, linking to that database:

docker run -d -e LEDGER_PORT=1337 -e LEDGER_ADMIN_PASS=admin -e LEDGER_DB_URI=postgres://postgres:password@db --link five-bells-ledger-db:db -p 1337:1337 -h localhost --name fivebells interledger/five-bells-ledger

Breaking down that command:

• -d Run in the background
• -e LEDGER_PORT=1337 Set the ledger's port to 1337. This is just an example for how to set a config option.
• -e LEDGER_ADMIN_PASS=admin Create an "admin" user with password "admin" at startup
• -e LEDGER_DB_URI=postgres://postgres:password@db Set the database URL. Here, 'db' is a host that is Docker-linked:
• --link five-bells-ledger-db:db This allows Five Bells Ledger to see the database that we set up above.
• -p 1337:1337 Expose port 1337 to localhost
• -h localhost makes the ledger use 'localhost' as its hostname in the endpoint URLs it announces
• --name fivebells This allows you to refer to this container in for instance docker inspect fivebells
• interledger/five-bells-ledger Use the five-bells-ledger Docker image

Now open http://localhost:1337/health in your browser.

To create a user, you can run:

curl -i -sS -X PUT --user admin:admin -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d'{ "name" : "alice", "password" : "alice", "balance" : "20000" }' http://localhost:1337/accounts/alice

To see the database contents, you can create a postgres container that interactively runs psql:

docker run -it --rm --link five-bells-ledger-db:db postgres psql postgres://postgres:password@db

You can then use ilp-plugin-bells to develop a client that connects to this ledger. Make sure you use the matching plugin version to connect to the ledger.

In particular, ledger version 20 can be accessed using ilp-plugin-bells version 12.

Running tests

To run tests using an in-memory database, run:

npm test

By default, stdout from the app process is buffered up, and only shown after a test fails. That way, you can easily debug a failing test:

DEBUG=ledger:* npm test

If you want to see the output for passing tests as well, and not buffered until the test is over, use the SHOW_STDOUT environment variable for this:

SHOW_STDOUT=true DEBUG=ledger:transfers npm test

If you wish to specify the database against which the tests are run, use the LEDGER_UNIT_DB_URI environment variable.

LEDGER_UNIT_DB_URI=postgres://root:password@localhost:5432/ledger_test_db npm test

For example, to run against a Postgres instance in Docker, first start the database server:

docker run -it --rm --name fbl-pg-test postgres

Then, in another terminal, run the tests:

LEDGER_UNIT_DB_URI=postgres://postgres@`docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' fbl-pg-test`/postgres npm test

A word of warning

This software is under development and no guarantees are made regarding reliability.