Dash Sentinel (DEPRECATED)

An automated governance helper for Dash Masternodes.

Note: Sentinel was deprecated by Dash Core 20.0 which migrated all functionality directly into Dash Core.

Sentinel is an autonomous agent for persisting, processing and automating Dash governance objects and tasks. It is a Python application which runs alongside the DashCore instance on each Dash Masternode.

Table of Contents

• Install
  • Dependencies
• Usage
• Configuration
• Troubleshooting
• Maintainer
• Contributing
• License

Install

These instructions cover installing Sentinel on Ubuntu 18.04 / 20.04.

Dependencies

Update system package list and install dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get -y install git python3 virtualenv

Make sure Python version 3.6.x or above is installed:

python3 --version

Make sure the local DashCore daemon running is at least version 0.15.0.

$ dashd --version | head -n1

Install Sentinel

Clone the Sentinel repo and install Python dependencies.

$ git clone https://github.com/dashpay/sentinel.git && cd sentinel
$ virtualenv -p $(which python3) ./venv
$ ./venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Sentinel is "used" as a script called from cron every minute.

Set up Cron

Set up a crontab entry to call Sentinel every minute:

$ crontab -e

In the crontab editor, add the lines below, replacing '/path/to/sentinel' to the path where you cloned sentinel to:

* * * * * cd /path/to/sentinel && ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.py >/dev/null 2>&1

Test Configuration

Test the config by running tests:

$ ./venv/bin/py.test ./test

With all tests passing and crontab setup, Sentinel will stay in sync with dashd and the installation is complete

Configuration

Configuration is done via environment variables. Example:

$ RPCUSER=dash RPCPASSWORD=password RPCHOST=127.0.0.1 RPCPORT=19998 ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.py

A path to a dash.conf file can be specified in sentinel.conf:

# warning: deprecated
dash_conf=/path/to/dash.conf

This is now deprecated and will be removed in a future version. Users are encouraged to update their configurations to use environment variables instead.

Troubleshooting

To view debug output, set the SENTINEL_DEBUG environment variable to anything non-zero, then run the script manually:

$ SENTINEL_DEBUG=1 ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.py

Maintainer

@nmarley

Contributing

Please follow the DashCore guidelines for contributing.

Specifically:

• Contributor Workflow

  To contribute a patch, the workflow is as follows:

  • Fork repository
  • Create topic branch
  • Commit patches

  In general commits should be atomic and diffs should be easy to read. For this reason do not mix any formatting fixes or code moves with actual code changes.

  Commit messages should be verbose by default, consisting of a short subject line (50 chars max), a blank line and detailed explanatory text as separate paragraph(s); unless the title alone is self-explanatory (like "Corrected typo in main.cpp") then a single title line is sufficient. Commit messages should be helpful to people reading your code in the future, so explain the reasoning for your decisions. Further explanation here.

Code Style

Please use black to format code automatically before opening a PR:

./venv/bin/black .

License

Released under the MIT license, under the same terms as DashCore itself. See LICENSE for more info.