emeraldpay/dshackle repository overview

Dshackle is a Blockchain API Load Balancer with automatic discovery and health checking, authentication and TLS termination. It can be used as an edge proxy, middle proxy or API gateway.

Dshackle provided a high level aggregated API on top of several underlying upstreams (blockchain nodes or providers, such as Geth, Parity, Infura, etc), it automatically verifies their availability and the current status of the network, executes commands making sure that the response is consistent and/or data successfully broadcasted to the network.

Project goals:

• stable and fault tolerant access to blockchain nodes
• secure connections and authentication
• allows to build scalable APIs with nodes distributed over multiple data centers

Dshackle connects to several upstreams via JSON RPC, Websockets or gRPC protocols. It verifies if a node ("upstream") is fully synchronized (not in initial sync mode), has enough peers and its height is not behind other nodes. If an upstream lags behind others, lost peers, started to resync, or simply went down then Dshackle temporarily excludes it from requests and returns back when the the upstream problem is fixed.

⁠Quick Start

⁠Configuration

Create file dshackle.yaml with following content:

version: v1
port: 2449
tls:
  enabled: false
upstreams:
  config: "upstreams.yaml"

Which sets the following:

• application listen on 0.0.0.0:2449
• TLS security is disabled (don't use in production!)
• read upstreams configuration from file upstreams.yaml in the current directory

Now create file upstreams.yaml:

version: v1
upstreams:
  - id: infura-eth
    chain: ethereum
    connection:
      ethereum:
        rpc:
          url: "https://mainnet.infura.io/v3/${INFURA_USER}"
        ws:
          url: "wss://mainnet.infura.io/ws/v3/${INFURA_USER}"
  - id: infura-kovan
    chain: kovan
    connection:
      ethereum:
        rpc:
          url: "https://kovan.infura.io/v3/${INFURA_USER}"

This configures:

• setups 2 upstreams, one for Ethereum Mainnet and another for Kovan Testnet (both upstreams are configured to use Infura endpoint)
• for Ethereum Mainnet it connects using JSON RPC and Websockets connections, for Kovan just JSON RPC is used
• Infura authentication config is omitted for this demo
• ${INFURA_USER} will be provided through environment variable

⁠Run docker image

Official Docker image you can find at: https://hub.docker.com/r/emeraldpay/dshackle⁠

Setup Infura username:

export INFURA_USER=...

Run Dshackle:

docker run -p 2449:2449 -v $(pwd):/etc/dshackle -e "INFURA_USER=$INFURA_USER" emeraldpay/dshackle

Now it listen on port 2449 at the localhost and can be connected from any gRPC compatible client. Tools such as https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl⁠ can automatically parse protobuf definitions and connect to it (actual Protobuf sources are located in a separate repository which you can find at https://github.com/emeraldpay/proto⁠)

.Connect and listen for new blocks on Ethereum Mainnet

grpcurl -import-path ./proto/ -proto blockchain.proto -d "{\"type\": 100}" -plaintext 127.0.0.1:2449 io.emeraldpay.api.Blockchain/SubscribeHead

.Output would be like

{
  "chain": "CHAIN_ETHEREUM",
  "height": 8396159,
  "blockId": "fc58a258adccc94466ae967b1178eea721349b0667f59d5fe1b0b436460bce75",
  "timestamp": 1566423564000,
  "weight": "AnMcf2VJB5kOSQ=="
}
{
  "chain": "CHAIN_ETHEREUM",
  "height": 8396160,
  "blockId": "787899711b862b77df8d2faa69de664048598265a9f96abf178d341076e200e0",
  "timestamp": 1566423574000,
  "weight": "AnMch35tO6hSGg=="
}
...
...

The output above is for a streaming subscription to all new blocks on Ethereum Mainnet. It's one of services provided by Dshackle, in additional to standard methods provided by RPC JSON of underlying nodes.

⁠Documentation

For detailed documentation see https://github.com/emeraldpay/dshackle/tree/master/docs⁠

⁠Development & Issues

https://github.com/emeraldpay/dshackle⁠