Running NEAR Lake Indexer
:::info
- NEAR Lake is a blockchain indexer built on top of NEAR Indexer microframework
- to watch the network and store all the events as JSON files on AWS S3.
-
::
How to start
The Lake Indexer setup consists of the following components:
- AWS S3 Bucket as a storage
- NEAR Lake binary that operates as a regular NEAR Protocol peer-to-peer node, so you will operate it as
any other Regular/RPC Node in NEAR
Prepare Development Environment
Before you proceed, make sure you have the following software installed:
- Rust compiler of the version that is mentioned in
rust-toolchain
file in the root of
nearcore project. -
Ensure you have AWS Credentials configured
From AWS Docs:For example, the files generated by the AWS CLI for a default profile configured with aws configure looks similar to the following.
~/.aws/credentials
[default] aws_access_key_id=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE aws_secret_access_key=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
Compile NEAR Lake
$ cargo build --release
Configure NEAR Lake
To connect NEAR Lake to the specific chain you need to have necessary configs, you can generate it as follows:
$ ./target/release/near-lake --home ~/.near/testnet init --chain-id testnet --download-config --download-genesis
- The above code will download the official genesis config and generate necessary configs. You can replace
testnet
in the command above to different network ID (betanet
,mainnet
). -
::info nearcore configuration
According to changes in nearcore
config generation we don’t fill all the necessary fields in the config file.
While this issue is open you need to download config you want and replace the generated one manually.
:::
Configs for the specified network are in the --home
provided folder. We need to ensure that NEAR Lake follows
all the necessary shards, so "tracked_shards"
parameters in ~/.near/testnet/config.json
needs to be configured properly.
Currently, nearcore
treats empty value for "tracked_shards"
as "do not track any shard" and any value as "track all shards".
For example, in order to track all shards, you just add the shard #0 to the list:
...
"tracked_shards": [0],
...
Run NEAR Lake
Commands to run NEAR Lake, after ./target/release/near-lake
Command | Key/Subcommand | Required/Default | Responsible for |
---|---|---|---|
--home |
Default ~/.near |
Tells the node where too look for necessary files: config.json , genesis.json , node_key.json , and data folder |
|
init |
Tells the node to generate config files in --home-dir |
||
--chain-id |
Required
|
Defines the chain to generate config files for | |
--download-config |
Optional | If provided tells the node to download config.json from the public URL. You can download them manually
|
|
--download-genesis |
Optional | If provided tells the node to download genesis.json from the public URL. You can download them manually
|
|
TODO: Other neard keys |
|||
run |
Runs the node | ||
--bucket |
Required | AWS S3 Bucket name | |
--region |
Required | AWS S3 Bucket region | |
--fallback-region |
Default eu-central-1 | AWS S3 Fallback region | |
--endpoint |
Optional | AWS S3 compatible API endpoint | |
--stream-while-syncing |
Optional | If provided Indexer streams blocks while they appear on the node instead of waiting the node to be fully synced | |
--concurrency |
Default 1 | Defines the concurrency for the process of saving block data to AWS S3 | |
sync-from-latest |
One of the sync- subcommands is required |
Tells the node to start indexing from the latest block in the network | |
sync-from-interruption |
One of the sync- subcommands is required |
Tells the node to start indexing from the block the node was interrupted on (if it is a first start it will fallback to sync-from-latest ) |
|
sync-from-block --height N |
One of the sync- subcommands is required |
Tells the node to start indexing from the specified block height N (Ensure you node data has the block you want to start from) |
$ ./target/release/near-lake --home ~/.near/testnet run --stream-while-syncing --concurrency 50 sync-from-latest
After the network is synced, you should see logs of every block height currently received by NEAR Lake.
Syncing
- Whenever you run NEAR Lake for any network except localnet you’ll need to sync with the network.
- This is required because it’s a natural behavior of
nearcore
node and NEAR Lake is a wrapper - for the regular
nearcore
node. In order to work and index the data your node must be synced - with the network. This process can take a while, so we suggest to download a fresh backup of
- the
data
folder and put it in you--home-dir
of your choice (by default it is~/.near
) -
::tip
Running your NEAR Lake node on top of a backup data will reduce the time of syncing process
because your node will download only the data after the backup was cut and it takes reasonable amount time. - ::
All the backups can be downloaded from the public S3 bucket which contains latest daily snapshots:
You will need AWS CLI to be installed in order to download the backups.
Mainnet
$ aws s3 --no-sign-request cp s3://near-protocol-public/backups/mainnet/rpc/latest .
$ LATEST=$(cat latest)
$ aws s3 --no-sign-request cp --no-sign-request --recursive s3://near-protocol-public/backups/mainnet/rpc/$LATEST ~/.near/data
Testnet
$ aws s3 --no-sign-request cp s3://near-protocol-public/backups/testnet/rpc/latest .
$ LATEST=$(cat latest)
$ aws s3 --no-sign-request cp --no-sign-request --recursive s3://near-protocol-public/backups/testnet/rpc/$LATEST ~/.near/data
Running NEAR Lake as an archival node
It’s not necessary but in order to index everything in the network it is better to do it from the genesis.
nearcore
node is running in non-archival mode by default. That means that the node keeps data only
for 5 last epochs. In order to index data from the genesis
you need to turn the node in archival mode.
To do it you need to update config.json
located in --home-dir
(by default it is ~/.near
).
Find next keys in the config and update them as following:
{
...
"archive": true,
"tracked_shards": [0],
...
}
The syncing process in archival mode can take a lot of time, so it’s better to download a backup provided by NEAR
and put it in your data
folder. After that your node will download only the data after the backup was cut and it
takes reasonable amount time.
All the backups can be downloaded from the public S3 bucket which contains the latest daily snapshots:
See this link for reference
Using the data
We write all the data to AWS S3 buckets:
near-lake-data-testnet
(eu-central-1
region) for testnetnear-lake-data-mainnet
(eu-central-1
region) for mainnet
Custom S3 storage
In case you want to run you own near-lake
instance and store data in some S3 compatible storage (Minio or Localstack as example)
You can override default S3 API endpoint by using --endpoint
option
- run
minio
$ mkdir -p /data/near-lake-custom && minio server /data
- run
near-lake
$ ./target/release/near-lake --home ~/.near/testnet run --endpoint http://127.0.0.1:9000 --bucket near-lake-custom sync-from-latest
Data structure
The data structure we use is the following:
<block_height>/
block.json
shard_0.json
shard_1.json
...
shard_N.json
<block_height>
is a 12-character-longu64
string with leading zeros (e.g000042839521
). See this issue for a reasoningblock_json
contains JSON-serializedBlockView
struct. Note: this struct might change in the future, we will announce itshard_N.json
whereN
isu64
starting from0
. Represents the index number of the shard. In order to find out the expected number of shards in the block you can look inblock.json
at.header.chunks_included
Access the data
All NEAR Lake AWS S3 buckets have Request Payer enabled. It means that anyone with their own AWS credentials can List and Read the bucket’s content and be charged for it by AWS. Connections to the bucket have to be done with AWS credentials provided. See NEAR Lake Framework for a reference.
NEAR Lake Framework
Once we set up the public access to the buckets anyone will be able to build their own code to read it through.
- For our own needs we are working on NEAR Lake Framework to have a simple way to create an indexer on top of the data stored by NEAR Lake itself.
-
::note
See the official NEAR Lake Framework announcement on the NEAR Gov Forum. - ::