Forest is a Filecoin node written in Rust. With Forest, you can:
- Send and receive FIL (at your own risk - Forest is experimental),
- validate the Filecoin blockchain,
- generate blockchain snapshots.
While less feature-complete than the canonical Filecoin node, Lotus, Forest aims to be the faster and easier-to-use alternative.
Have questions? Feel free to post them in Forest Q&A!
No need to install Rust toolchain or other dependencies, you will need only Docker - works on Linux, macOS and Windows.
# daemon
β― docker run --init -it --rm ghcr.io/chainsafe/forest:latest --help
# cli
β― docker run --init -it --rm --entrypoint forest-cli ghcr.io/chainsafe/forest:latest --help
Next, run a Forest node in a CLI window. E.g. Run calibration network
Thereafter, in another terminal, you will be able to use the forest-cli
binary
directly by launching bash
in the forest
container:
docker exec -it forest /bin/bash
For more in-depth usage and sample use cases, please refer to the Forest Docker
documentation in the Forest Book. Keep in mind that the latest
tag is the
latest stable release. If you want to use the current development build, use the
edge
tag.
- Rust (toolchain version is specified in
rust-toolchain.toml
)
Install rustup
- OS Base-Devel/Build-Essential
- Clang compiler
sudo apt install build-essential clang
sudo pacman -S base-devel clang
sudo dnf install -y clang-devel
apk add git curl make gcc clang clang-dev musl-dev
# Clone repository
git clone --recursive https://github.com/chainsafe/forest
cd forest
# Install binary to $HOME/.cargo/bin
make install
# Run the node on mainnet
forest
To create release binaries, checkout the latest tag and compile with the release
feature.
git checkout $TAG
make build # make debug build of forest daemon and cli
# or
make release # make release build of forest daemon and cli
# or
make install # install forest daemon and cli
To encrypt the keystore while in headless mode, set the FOREST_KEYSTORE_PHRASE
environmental variable. Otherwise, skip the encryption (not recommended in
production environments) with --encrypt-keystore false
.
Run the node with custom config and bootnodes
forest --config /path/to/your_config.toml
Example of config options available:
data_dir = "<directory for all chain and networking data>"
genesis_file = "<relative file path of genesis car file>"
[network]
listening_multiaddr = "<multiaddress>"
bootstrap_peers = ["<multiaddress>"]
Example of a multiaddress:
"/ip4/54.186.82.90/tcp/1347/p2p/12D3K1oWKNF7vNFEhnvB45E9mw2B5z6t419W3ziZPLdUDVnLLKGs"
Forest will look for config files in the following order and priority:
- Paths passed to the command line via the
--config
flag. - The environment variable
FOREST_CONFIG_PATH
, if no config was passed through command line arguments. - If none of the above are found, Forest will look in the systems default
configuration directory (
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME
on Linux systems). - After all locations are exhausted and a config file is not found, a default configuration is assumed and used.
The Forest logger uses
Rust's log filtering options
with the RUST_LOG
environment variable. For example:
RUST_LOG="debug,forest_libp2p::service=info" forest
Will show all debug logs by default, but the forest_libp2p::service
logs will
be limited to info
Forest can also send telemetry to the endpoint of a Loki instance or a Loki
agent (see Grafana Cloud). Use --loki
to
enable it and --loki-endpoint
to specify the interface and the port.
First, install the nextest
test runner.
cargo install cargo-nextest --locked
# To run base tests
cargo nextest run # use `make test-release` for longer compilation but faster execution
# To run all tests and all features enabled
make test-all
Chain synchronization checks are run after every merge to main
. This code is
maintained in a separate repository - Forest IaC.
The project uses exhaustively a set of linters to keep the codebase clean and secure in an automated fashion. While the CI will have them installed, if you want to run them yourself before submitting a PR (recommended), you should install a few of them.
# You can install those linters also with other package managers or by manually grabbing the binaries from the projects' repositories.
# Rust code linter
rustup component add clippy
# Rust code formatter
rustup component add rustfmt
# TOML linter
cargo install taplo-cli --locked
# Scanning dependencies for security vulnerabilities
cargo install cargo-audit
# Spellcheck
cargo install cargo-spellcheck
After everything is installed, you can run make lint-all
.
Select the builtin calibnet configuration with the --chain
option. The
--auto-download-snapshot
will ensure that a snapshot is downloaded if needed
without any prompts.
./target/release/forest --chain calibnet --auto-download-snapshot
When the Forest daemon is started, an admin token will be displayed
(alternatively, use --save-token <token>
flag to save it on disk). You will
need this for commands that require a higher level of authorization (like a
password). Forest, as mentioned above, uses multiaddresses for networking. This
is no different in the CLI. To set the host and the port to use, if not using
the default port or using a remote host, set the FULLNODE_API_INFO
environment
variable. This is also where you can set a token for authentication.
FULLNODE_API_INFO="<token goes here>:/ip4/<host>/tcp/<port>/http
Note that if a token is not present in the FULLNODE_API_INFO env variable, the colon is removed.
Forest developers will prepend this variable to CLI commands over using export
on Linux or its equivalent on Windows. This will look like the following:
FULLNODE_API_INFO="..." forest-cli auth api-info -p admin
The admin token can also be set using --token
flag.
forest-cli --token <ADMIN_TOKEN>
The binaries in the Forest repository are organized into the following categories:
Binary | Role | Command example |
---|---|---|
forest |
Forest daemon, used to connect to the Filecoin network | forest --chain calibnet --encrypt-keystore false |
forest-cli |
Human-friendly wrappers around the Filecoin JSON-RPC API | forest-cli info show |
forest-tool |
Handle tasks not involving the Forest daemon | forest-tool snapshot fetch |
You can detach Forest process via the --detach
flag so that it runs in the
background:
./target/release/forest --detach
The command will block until the detached Forest process has started its RPC server, allowing you to chain some RPC command immediately after.
- Check out our contribution guidelines: CONTRIBUTING.md
We take all security issues seriously, if you believe you have found a security issue within a ChainSafe project please notify us immediately. If an issue is confirmed, we will take all necessary precautions to ensure a statement and patch release is made in a timely manner.
Please email a description of the flaw and any related information (e.g. reproduction steps, version) to security at chainsafe dot io.
Forest is dual licensed under MIT + Apache 2.0.