Launching Testnet - Mesopotamia

As we announced in our final blog posts on medium, we have released our first Testnet - codenamed Mesopotamia.

Goals

Our goals with this release are to get familiar with the framework, test the functionality of Tendermint and the Cosmos SDK, and give our community a taste of where the project is heading.

Although there are a limited set of features at this stage, we hope some of you will join in testing, give some feedback, and prepare yourselves to be full node operators and validators on future releases.

If you're comfortable with the command line and want to compile from source, please visit our github repo to get started. The latest binaries can be found here. If you are interested in the project, but need a little more help to get started, continue with the tutorial below!

Tutorial

This is a step by step guide to getting a full node up and running on the Joystream Testnet, with the option of becoming a validator. The instructions are divided into four sections, and given for both Windows and Mac users.

Download and install the binaries
Setup your account and start your full node
Get JOY tokens from the faucet
Become a validator

For linux users that doesn't wish to compile the binaries, the instructions should be very similar to those on Mac. If you need any extra help, feel free to reach out on Telegram, Twitter or Reddit!

General Notes

Every time something is written in 'single_quotes', this means you have to replace this with your input - without the quotes. For terminal commands, > and $ means you must type what comes after that on windows and mac respectively.

Assuming joystream1hh4egjkafgxn7q26zxgsuz8tw9k8ur2dfefntz is your address, and you want to check your balance, the following instruction...

#On windows
> joycli query account 'joystream_address' --chain-id joy-testnet-1000
#On Mac
$ ./joycli query account 'joystream_address' --chain-id joy-testnet-1000

...means you must paste/type exactly:

joycli query account joystream1hh4egjkafgxn7q26zxgsuz8tw9k8ur2dfefntz --chain-id joy-testnet-1000 on windows.

./joycli query account joystream1hh4egjkafgxn7q26zxgsuz8tw9k8ur2dfefntz --chain-id joy-testnet-1000 on mac.

Windows

Download and Verify the Binaries

If you haven't already downloaded the correct file, click here . Go to your download folder, and extract the file to the destination of your choice. To simplify the instructions, I'm going to extract it to C:\Joy\ so the full path to the executable files is C:\Joy\windows_amd64\

Now, open your first windows terminal (Command Prompt) and give the following command:

> cd C:\Joy\windows_amd64\

The command dir should reveal four files in the folder, joyd.exe, joycli.exe, config.toml and genesis.json.

Verify the versions (and optionally, the checksums):

#Versions
> joyd version
0.29.0-30-g1dbaa640-joystream
> joycli version
0.29.0-30-g1dbaa640-joystream

#Checksums
> Certutil -hashfile joyd.exe sha256
128ed575a748ce30bf814a3d26ac890569c43717ac67450fc2fbe096004521d0
> Certutil -hashfile joycli.exe sha256
e2e4f5689f38f0aafc2cad49f11f54b7afc11ce1047693971b9cf04e5902f59c

If you get different outputs, go to github and make sure you have downloaded the correct binaries.

Setup Your Account and Start the Node

First, make the following command:

> mkdir C:\.joyd\config

#Assuming you unpacked the .zip file to C:\Joy:
> copy config.toml C:\.joyd\config
> copy genesis.json C:\.joyd\config

For the next part, you don't need the terminal, but leave it open. Open Explorer, and navigate to C:\.joyd\config. Open config.tomlwith a text editor, and replace node0 with your preferred moniker on line 7.

Go back to the terminal window, and fire up your node:

> joyd start

This will start the network, and sync your node. When the rate of new blocks has slowed to once every 5 seconds, it means you are fully synced. You are now running a full node!
If you want to leave your node running, don't close the terminal, as this will kill the process.

Get JOY Tokens from the Faucet

To get some tokens, you first need to find your address. Without closing the old one, open a new terminal (terminal 2). To generate an account with a set of keys:

> cd C:\Joy\windows_amd64\
> joycli keys add 'your_account_name'

After you have successfully typed and repeated your 8+ character passphrase, the output will be an address, public key and 24 word BIP39 compatible seed (derivation path: 44´/118´/0´/0/0). If you want to continue using your account, or keeping it for future testnets, write down your seed on a piece of paper.

Now, copy your address to the clipboard, and head over to our faucet. Paste it in, solve the captcha, and hit Send me tokens.

To check your new balance, go back to terminal 2 and type:

> joycli query account 'your_address' --chain-id joy-testnet-2000

If you see "joy","amount":"100" somewhere in the output, you have now received your first JOY tokens! If you get and error message, chances are you are not yet fully synced. If you are impatient, go to the block explorer, and you should see your transaction if you scroll down.

Become a Validator

If you want to earn your share of the block reward, you need to become a validator. In terminal 2:

> joyd tendermint show-validator

To get your `validator_pub_key`, then create a staking transaction:

> joycli tx stake create-validator --amount=100joy --pubkey='validator_pub_key' ^
--moniker='your_moniker' --chain-id=joy-testnet-2000 --from='your_account' ^
--commission-rate="0.10" --commission-max-rate="0.20" --commission-max-change-rate="0.01"

The output can be quite confusing, so it's best to check your status in the block explorer. If your moniker is be listed as part of the validator set, you have succeeded in becoming a validator!

If you want to bond more stake, either to yourself or someone else:

#Check your balance again
> joycli query account 'your_address' --chain-id joy-testnet-2000

#List the validator set
> joycli query stake validators --trust-node=1

#Replace 'amount' and 'operator_address' with your desired amount and destination
> joycli tx stake delegate --amount 'amount'joy --from 'your_account' ^ 
--chain-id joy-testnet-2000 --validator 'operator_address'

If you want to try out some other features, make sure to go here after you're up and running!

On Mac

Download and Verify the Binaries

If you haven't already downloaded the correct file, click here, and download darwin_amd64.zip.

Go to your download folder, and extract the file to the destination of your choice. Assuming you you unzipped to your download folder, open the terminal, and type the following command:

$ cp -R Downloads/darwin_amd64 ~/
$ cd darwin_amd64

The ls command should list joyd and joycli.