@permaweb/ao-connect

ao Connect

The ao-connect library provides an abstraction for spawning, evaluating, and interacting with ao Processes.

This module will run in a browser or server environment.

• Read the result of an ao Message evaluation from a ao Compute Unit cu
• Send a Message targeting an ao Process to an ao Message Unit mu
• Spawn an ao Process, assigning it to an ao Scheduler Unit su

• Usage
  • ESM (Node & Browser) aka type: module
  • CJS (Node) type: commonjs
  • API
    • result
    • message
    • spawn
    • connect
    • Environment Variables
    • createDataItemSigner
• Debug Logging
• Testing
• Project Structure

Usage

This module can be used on the server, as well as the browser:

ESM (Node & Browser) aka type: module

import { message, result, spawn } from "@permaweb/ao-connect";

CJS (Node) type: commonjs

const { spawn, message, result } = require("@permaweb/ao-connect");

The duration of this document will use ESM for examples

API

result

Read the result of the message evaluation from an ao Compute Unit cu

import { result } from "@permaweb/ao-connect";

let { messages, spawns, output, error } = await result({
  message: "l3hbt-rIJ_dr9at-eQ3EVajHWMnxPNm9eBtXpzsFWZc",
  process: "5SGJUlPwlenkyuG9-xWh0Rcf0azm8XEd5RBTiutgWAg",
});

message

send a message to an ao Message Unit mu targeting an ao process.

import { createDataItemSigner, message } from "@permaweb/ao-connect";

const messageId = await message({
  process,
  signer: createDataItemSigner(wallet),
  anchor,
  tags,
  data,
});

You can pass a 32 byte anchor to message which will be set on the DataItem

spawn

Spawn an ao process, assigning the ao Scheduler to schedule its messages

import { createDataItemSigner, spawn } from "@permaweb/ao-connect";

const processId = await spawn({
  module,
  scheduler,
  signer: createDataItemSigner(wallet),
  tags,
  data,
});

connect

If you would like the connect to use ao components other than the defaults, you can specify those components by providing their urls to connect. You can currently specify:

• The GATEWAY_URL (GATEWAY_URL)
• The Messenger Unit URL (MU_URL)
• The Compute Unit URL (CU_URL)

import { connect } from "@permaweb/ao-connect";

const { spawn, message, result } = connect({
  GATEWAY_URL: "...",
  MU_URL: "...",
  CU_URL: "...",
});

If any url is not provided, a library default will be used. In this sense, invoking connect() with no parameters or an empty object is functionally equivalent to using the top-lvl exports of the library:

import {
 spawn,
 message,
 result
 connect
} from '@permaweb/ao-connect';

// These are functionally equivalent
connect() == { spawn, message, result }

Environment Variables

The library also allows configuring ao components described above, using environment variables.

On NodeJS, you can use process.env to set these values.

In the browser, you can use globalThis to set these values.

In both cases, you should set environment variables prior to importing the module. If this is not possible, consider using connect and passing in values from the environment that way.

createDataItemSigner

message and spawn both require signing a DataItem with a wallet.

createDataItemSigner is a convenience api that, given a wallet, returns a function that can be passed to both message and spawn in order to properly sign DataItems.

The library provides a browser compatible and node compatible version that you can use OOTB.

The browser compatible versions expects an instance of window.arweaveWallet to be passed to it:

import { createDataItemSigner } from "@permaweb/ao-connect";

const signer = createDataItemSigner(globalThis.arweaveWallet);

The node compatible versions expects a JWK interface to be passed to it:

import fs from "node:fs";
import { createDataItemSigner } from "@permaweb/ao-connect";

const wallet = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(process.env.PATH_TO_WALLET));
const signer = createDataItemSigner(wallet);

You can also implement your own createDataItemSigner, as long as it satisfies the api. Here is what the API looks like in TypeScript:

type CreateDataItemSigner = (wallet: any):
  (args: { data: any, tags?: { name: string, value: string}[], target?: string, anchor?: string }):
    Promise<{ id: string, raw: ArrayBuffer }>

Debug Logging

You can enable verbose debug logging on the library. All logging is scoped under the name @permaweb/ao-connect*. You can use wildcards to enable a subset of logs ie. @permaweb/ao-connect/result*

For Node, set the DEBUG environment variable to the logs you're interested in.

For the Browser, set the localStorage.debug variable to the logs you're interested in.

Testing

Run npm test to run the tests.

Run npm run test:integration to run the integration tests.

Project Structure

The ao-connect project loosely implements the Ports and Adapters Architecture.

All business logic is in lib where each public api is implemented and tested.

dal.js contains the contracts for the driven adapters aka side-effects. Implementations for those contracts are injected into, then parsed and invoked by, the business logic. This is how we inject specific integrations for providers ie. Warp, Irys, or even platforms specific implementations like node and the browser while keeping them separated from the business logic -- the business logic simply consumes a black-box API -- easy to stub, and easy to unit test.

Because the contract wrapping is done by the business logic itself, it also ensures the stubs we use in our unit tests accurately implement the contract API. Thus our unit tests are simoultaneously contract tests.

client contains implementations, of the contracts in dal.js, for various platforms. The unit tests for the implementations in client also import contracts from dal.js to help ensure that the implementation properly satisfies the API.

Finally, the entrypoints (index.js for Node and index.browser.js for the Browser) orchestrate everything, choosing the appropriate implementations from client and injecting them into the business logic from lib.