Flow is a fast, secure, and developer-friendly blockchain built to support the next generation of games, apps and the digital assets that power them. Read more about it here.
You can find an overview of the Flow architecture on the documentation website.
Development on Flow is divided into work streams. Each work stream has a home directory containing high-level documentation for the stream, as well as links to documentation for relevant components used by that work stream.
The following table lists all work streams and links to their home directory and documentation:
Work Stream | Home directory |
---|---|
Access Node | /cmd/access |
Collection Node | /cmd/collection |
Consensus Node | /cmd/consensus |
Execution Node | /cmd/execution |
Verification Node | /cmd/verification |
Observer Service | /cmd/observer |
HotStuff | /consensus/hotstuff |
Storage | /storage |
Ledger | /ledger |
Networking | /network |
Cryptography | /crypto |
Make sure the GOPATH
and GOBIN
environment variables
are set, and GOBIN
is added to your path:
export GOPATH=$(go env GOPATH)
export GOBIN=$GOPATH/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$GOBIN
Add these to your shell profile to persist them for future runs.
Then, run the following command:
make install-tools
At this point, you should be ready to build, test, and run Flow! 🎉
Flow has a unit test suite and an integration test suite. Unit tests for a module live within the module they are
testing. Integration tests live in integration/tests
.
Run the unit test suite:
make test
Run the integration test suite:
make integration-test
The recommended way to build and run Flow for local development is using Docker.
Build a Docker image for all nodes:
make docker-native-build-flow
Build a Docker image for a particular node role (replace $ROLE
with collection
, consensus
, etc.):
make docker-native-build-$ROLE
Build the binary for an access node that can be run directly on the machine without using Docker.
make docker-native-build-access-binary
_this builds a binary for Linux/x8664 machine.
The make command will generate a binary called flow_access_node
When importing the github.com/onflow/flow-go
module in your Go project, testing or building your project may require setting extra Go flags because the module requires cgo. In particular, CGO_ENABLED
must be set to 1
if cgo
isn't enabled by default. This constraint comes from the underlying cryptography library. Refer to the crypto repository build for more details.
A local version of the network can be run for manual testing and integration. See the Local Network Guide for instructions.
Generated code is kept up to date in the repository, so should be committed whenever it changes.
Run all code generators:
make generate
Generate protobuf stubs:
make generate-proto
Generate OpenAPI schema models:
make generate-openapi
Generate mocks used for unit tests:
make generate-mocks