Launch

In this section we discuss using pendulum-launch to launch a parachain.

The following command details how pendulum-launch is used. The --config option can be used to set the path of a config file. The --log option can be used to set an alternate logging directory.

pendulum-launch help

pendulum-launch 0.2.0

USAGE:
    pendulum-launch [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] [SUBCOMMAND]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -q, --quiet
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
    -c, --config <config>
    -l, --log <log>

SUBCOMMANDS:
    export-genesis     Export genesis data
    generate-docker    Generate docker-compose.yml
    generate-specs     Generate specs
    help               Prints this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

As an example, we might want to launch our parachain as follows ./bin/pendulum-launch --config ./launch-local.json --log ./tmp/local in order to provide an alternate config and log directory.

Launching a local Pendulum chain

Prerequisites

To launch a local parachain you have to run a multitude of commands.

First, build the parachain-collator binary. From the root directory of your parachain (in this case pendulum) run:

cargo build --release

The next steps assume that you are in the root directory of the pendulum-launch repository.

Next, use pendulum-launch to generate the chain specs.

# Generate specs for parachain with ID 2000 and export to ./specs directory
./target/release/pendulum-launch generate-specs -n rococo-local-parachain -i 2000 -o ./specs/ ../pendulum/target/release/parachain-collator

With the chain spec, we can now export the genesis data.

# Export genesis to local directory and export to ./specs directory
./target/release/pendulum-launch export-genesis -o ./specs ../pendulum/target/release/parachain-collator ./specs/rococo-local-parachain-raw.json

To run our setup we also need to have the binary of the polkadot relay chain. If you don't want to compile it yourself you can download it from the releases page. Make sure you download the relay chain that works for the version of your parachain (i.e. if your parachain uses polkadot-v0.9.17 dependencies, you should also download the corresponding relay chain).

Launch the parachain

Now that we have all the prerequisites we need for running our Pendulum chain, we can use pendulum-launch to simultaneously run our relay-chain collators as well as our parachain validator.

You can find the settings of both collators and validators in the pendulum-launch/config/pendulum-launch.json file. Check if the paths to the binaries are correct for your local setup. From the root directory of the pendulum-launch repository, run:

# Launch local setup based on supplied config
./target/release/pendulum-launch --config ./config/pendulum-launch.json 

Now you just need to register your parachain in the polkadot.js explorer, as is described here. For genesisHead use the pendulum-launch/specs/local-chain-state file and for validationCode use the pendulum-launch/specs/local-chain-wasm file.

You should see your parachain producing blocks after the onboarding is completed.