Welcome to Pathfinder

A StarkNet full node giving you a safe view into StarkNet.

Pathfinder is currently in alpha so expect some rough edges but it is already usable today!

Features

• access the full StarkNet state history
  • includes contract code and storage, and transactions
• verifies state using L1
  • calculates the StarkNet state's Patricia-Merkle Trie root on a block-by-block basis and confirms it against L1
  • this means the contract code and storage are now locally verified
• Ethereum-like RPC API
• run StarkNet functions without requiring a StarkNet transaction
  • executed against the local state

Feedback

We appreciate any feedback, especially during this alpha period. This includes any documentation issues, feature requests and bugs that you may encounter.

For help or to submit bug reports or feature requests, please open an issue or alternatively visit the StarkNet discord channel.

Installation

If you'd like to just run the node, please consider skipping ahead to docker instructions. The following are instructions on how to build from source.

Prerequisites

Currently only supports Linux. Windows and MacOS support is planned. We need access to a full Ethereum node operating on the network matching the StarkNet network you wish to run. Currently this is either Goerli or Mainnet.

⚠️	If using Infura as an L1 provider, you will need access to their archive node facilities. This is because pathfinder requires access to the full log history.

Before you start, make sure your system is up to date with Curl and Git available:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install curl git

Install Rust

pathfinder requires Rust version 1.58 or later. The easiest way to install Rust is by following the official instructions.

If you already have Rust installed, verify the version:

cargo --version # must be 1.58 or higher

To update your Rust version, use the rustup tool that came with the official instructions:

rustup update

Install Python

pathfinder requires Python version 3.8 (in particular, cairo-lang 0.7.1 seems incompatible with Python 3.10).

sudo apt install python3 python3-venv python3-dev

Verify the python version. Some Linux distributions only supply an outdated python version, in which case you will need to lookup a guide for your distribution.

python3 --version # must be 3.8

Install build dependencies

pathfinder compilation need additional libraries to be installed (C compiler, linker, other deps)

sudo apt install build-essential libgmp-dev pkg-config libssl-dev

Clone pathfinder

Checkout the latest pathfinder release by cloning this repo and checking out the latest version tag. Take care not to be on our main branch as we do actively develop in it.

The remainder of the installation documentation assumes you are in the checkout directory.

Python setup

Create a python virtual environment in the py folder.

# Enter the `<repo>/py` directory
cd py
# Create the virtual environment and activate it
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Next install the python tooling and dependencies

PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=true pip install --upgrade pip
PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=true pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Finally, run our python tests to make sure you were succesful.

# This should run the tests (and they should pass).
pytest

Compiling pathfinder

You should now be able to compile pathfinder by running (from within the pathfinder repo):

cargo build --release --bin pathfinder

Running the node

Ensure you have activated the python virtual environment you created in the python setup step. For the pathfinder environment this is done by running:

source py/.venv/bin/activate

If you are already in another virtual environment, you can exit it by running deactivate and then activating the pathfinder one.

This step is always required when running pathfinder.

Finally, you can start the node:

cargo run --release --bin pathfinder -- <pathfinder options>

Note the extra "--" which separate the Rust cargo command options from the options for our node. For more information on these options see the Configuration section.

It may take a while to first compile the node on the first invocation if you didn't do the compilation step.

pathfinder runs relative to the current directory. This means things like the database will be created and searched for within the current directory.

Configuration

The pathfinder node options can be configured via the command line as well as a configuration file or environment variables. The command line configuration overrides the options from the file.

The command line options are passed in after the after the cargo run options, as follows:

cargo run --release --bin pathfinder -- <pathfinder options>

Using --help will display the pathfinder options, including their environment variable names:

# with built from source
cargo run --release --bin pathfinder -- --help

# with docker images (0.2.0 onwards)
docker run --rm eqlabs/pathfinder

The configuration file uses the toml format:

# The address we will host the RPC API at. Defaults to "127.0.0.1:9545"
http-rpc = "127.0.0.1:1235"
# The directory the node will use to store its data. Defaults to the current directory.
data-directory = "..."

[ethereum]
# This is required and must be an HTTP(s) URL pointing to your Ethereum node's endpoint.
url      = "https://goerli.infura.io/v3/..." #
# The optional password for your Ethereum endpoint.
password = "..."
# The optional user-agent for your Ethereum endpoint.
user-agent     = "..."

Logging

Logging can be configured using the RUST_LOG environment variable. We recommend setting it when you invoke the run command:

RUST_LOG=<log level> cargo run --release --bin pathfinder ...

The following log levels are supported, from most to least verbose:

trace
debug
info  # default
warn
error

At the more verbose log levels (trace, debug), you may find the logs a bit noisy as our dependencies also add their own logging to the mix. You can restrict the logs to only pathfinder specific ones using RUST_LOG=pathfinder=<level> instead. For example:

RUST_LOG=pathfinder=<log level> cargo run --release --bin pathfinder ...

Network Selection

The StarkNet network is based on the provided Ethereum endpoint. If the Ethereum endpoint is on the Goerli network, then the it will be the StarkNet testnet on Goerli. If the Ethereum endpoint is on mainnet, then it will be StarkNet Mainnet.

Running with Docker

The pathfinder node can be run in the provided Docker image. Docker image is the easiest way which does not involve a lot of python setup. The following assumes you have docker installed and ready to go.

The example uses $HOME/pathfinder as the volume directory where persistent files used by pathfinder will be stored. It is easiest to create the volume directory as the user who is running the docker command. If the directory gets created by docker upon startup, it might be unusable for creating files.

# ensure the directory has been created before invoking docker
mkdir -p $HOME/pathfinder
docker run \
  --rm \
  -p 9545:9545 \
  -e RUST_LOG=info \
  -e PATHFINDER_ETHEREUM_API_URL="https://goerli.infura.io/v3/<project-id>" \
  -v $HOME/pathfinder:/usr/share/pathfinder/data \
  eqlabs/pathfinder

Updating the docker image

When pathfinder detects there has been a new release, it will log a message similar to:

WARN New pathfinder release available! Please consider updating your node! release=0.1.8-alpha

You can try pulling the latest docker image to update it:

docker pull eqlabs/pathfinder

There is a chance of seeing the release notification before a new docker image is available for download, so just wait a minutes and then retry.

Available images

Our images are updated on every pathfinder release. This means that the :latest docker image does not track our main branch here, but instead matches the latest pathfinder release.

Building the container image yourself

Building the container image from source code is necessary only in special cases or development. You can build the image by running:

docker build -t pathfinder .

API

The full specification is available here. Note that we currently only support a subset of these. Here is an overview of the JSON-RPC calls which we support.

# Block information
starknet_getBlockByHash
starknet_getBlockByNumber
# Value of a storage at a given address and key
starknet_getStorageAt
# Transaction information
starknet_getTransactionByHash
starknet_getTransactionByBlockHashAndIndex
starknet_getTransactionByBlockNumberAndIndex
starknet_getTransactionReceipt
# Block transaction counts
starknet_getBlockTransactionCountByHash
starknet_getBlockTransactionCountByNumber
# The code of a specific contract
starknet_getCode
# Call a StarkNet function without creating a transaction
starknet_call
# The latest StarkNet block height
starknet_blockNumber
# The StarkNet chain this node is on
starknet_chainId
# The node's sync status
starknet_syncing
# Returns all events matching the given filter
starknet_getEvents
# Submit a new invoke contract transaction
starknet_addInvokeTransaction
# Submit a new deploy contract transaction
starknet_addDeployTransaction
# Submit a new declare contract transaction
starknet_addDeclareTransaction

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.