ironfish

The main entry point for an Iron Fish CLI that is capable of mining blocks and spending notes. It's created using the oclif CLI framework

Starting the CLI

If you're still in the ironfish directory in your terminal window, run cd ironfish-cli.

• Otherwise, you'll get a "Command not found" error.

Next, start the CLI with this command:

• yarn start

Usage Scenarios

Starting a single node

Run this command in the terminal:

• yarn start start

Interact with the node in a new terminal window:

• yarn start status
  • Show your node's status
• yarn start wallet:balance
  • Show the balance of your account, including $IRON from blocks you've mined
  • Tentative balance includes all known transactions. Spending balance includes only transactions on blocks on the main chain
• yarn start faucet
  • Request a small amount of $IRON for testing payments
• yarn start wallet:send
  • Send $IRON to another account
• yarn start wallet:transactions [account]
  • Display transactions from and to your account

Start a node and start mining

Run these commands in two different terminals:

• yarn start start

  • Defaults to port 9033
  • This is equivalent to yarn start start -d default -p 9033

• yarn start miners:start

  • The default thread count is 1.

  • You can increase the number of threads by adding --threads <number>. Use -1 to autodetect threads based on your CPU cores.

  • Examples:

    • yarn start miners:start --threads 4
      • To use 4 physical CPU cores
    • yarn start miners:start --threads -1
      • To use all the cores on your CPU
      • This may make your machine unresponsive or perform worse than a lesser number.
      • You may want to start with a low thread count and increase it until your hashrate stops increasing.

  • Note: Hyperthreading (2 miner threads per CPU core) is not fully optimized yet

You should see messages in the second terminal indicating that the miner is running:

• Starting to mine with 8 threads
• Mining block 6261 on request 1264... \ 1105974 H/s
  • The H/s number corresponds to the hashrate power of your machine with the given number of mining threads.
  • Performance reference: 8-core 3.8+ GHz AMD Ryzen 7 4700G with 8 threads gave the above 1.1 M H/s.

When a block is mined, you will see a status line in the node's terminal (the first terminal):

• Successfully mined block xxx (6543) has 1 transactions
• Mining 1 block can take several hours or days, depending on your machine's hashrate.
• Your miner may display Submitting hash for block, but this does not necessarily mean you've mined a block. The block still needs to be created, validated, and checked to be heavier by the node before it can be added to the main chain.
  • In these cases, your node will display "Discarding block" or "Failed to add block".

Multiple Nodes

Run these commands in two different terminals:

• yarn start start -d default -p 9033
• yarn start start -d client -p 9034 -b ws://localhost:9033

You should see connection messages indicating that the two nodes are talking to each other.

Multiple Nodes with Miners

Node 1

# in tab 1
yarn start start

# in tab 2
yarn start miners:start

Node 2

# in tab 3
yarn start start --datadir ~/.ironfish2 --port 9034 --bootstrap ws://localhost:9033

# in tab 4
yarn start miners:start --datadir ~/.ironfish2

Running a Development Node

# in tab 1
yarn start start --networkId=2 --datadir ~/.ironfish-dev 

# in tab 2
yarn start miners:start --datadir ~/.ironfish-dev

# in tab 3, to check the status of the node
yarn start status --datadir ~/.ironfish-dev 

# in tab 3, to check the wallet balance
yarn start wallet:balance --datadir ~/.ironfish-dev 

More information on local mining and testing

Documentation

CLI Commands