Development Environment

Most Lighthouse developers work on Linux or MacOS, however Windows should still be suitable.

First, follow the Installation Guide to install Lighthouse. This will install Lighthouse to your PATH, which is not particularly useful for development but still a good way to ensure you have the base dependencies.

The additional requirements for developers are:

  • anvil. This is used to simulate the execution chain during tests. You'll get failures during tests if you don't have anvil available on your PATH.
  • cmake. Used by some dependencies. See Installation Guide for more info.
  • java 17 runtime. 17 is the minimum, used by web3signer_tests.
  • libpq-dev. Also known as libpq-devel on some systems.
  • docker. Some tests need docker installed and running.

Using make

Commands to run the test suite are available via the Makefile in the project root for the benefit of CI/CD. We list some of these commands below so you can run them locally and avoid CI failures:

  • $ make cargo-fmt: (fast) runs a Rust code formatting check.
  • $ make lint: (fast) runs a Rust code linter.
  • $ make test: (medium) runs unit tests across the whole project.
  • $ make test-ef: (medium) runs the Ethereum Foundation test vectors.
  • $ make test-full: (slow) runs the full test suite (including all previous commands). This is approximately everything that is required to pass CI.

The lighthouse test suite is quite extensive, running the whole suite may take 30+ minutes.

Testing

As with most other Rust projects, Lighthouse uses cargo test for unit and integration tests. For example, to test the ssz crate run:

$ cd consensus/ssz
$ cargo test
    Finished test [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 7.69s
     Running unittests (target/debug/deps/ssz-61fc26760142b3c4)

running 27 tests
test decode::impls::tests::awkward_fixed_length_portion ... ok
test decode::impls::tests::invalid_h256 ... ok
<snip>
test encode::tests::test_encode_length ... ok
test encode::impls::tests::vec_of_vec_of_u8 ... ok
test encode::tests::test_encode_length_above_max_debug_panics - should panic ... ok

test result: ok. 27 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 0.00s

     Running tests/tests.rs (target/debug/deps/tests-f8fb1f9ccb197bf4)

running 20 tests
test round_trip::bool ... ok
test round_trip::first_offset_skips_byte ... ok
test round_trip::fixed_len_excess_bytes ... ok
<snip>
test round_trip::vec_u16 ... ok
test round_trip::vec_of_vec_u16 ... ok

test result: ok. 20 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 0.00s

   Doc-tests ssz

running 3 tests
test src/decode.rs - decode::SszDecoder (line 258) ... ok
test src/encode.rs - encode::SszEncoder (line 57) ... ok
test src/lib.rs - (line 10) ... ok

test result: ok. 3 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 0.15s$ cargo test -p eth2_ssz

Alternatively, since lighthouse is a cargo workspace you can use -p eth2_ssz where eth2_ssz is the package name as defined /consensus/ssz/Cargo.toml

$ head -2 consensus/ssz/Cargo.toml
[package]
name = "eth2_ssz"
$ cargo test -p eth2_ssz
    Finished test [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 7.69s
     Running unittests (target/debug/deps/ssz-61fc26760142b3c4)

running 27 tests
test decode::impls::tests::awkward_fixed_length_portion ... ok
test decode::impls::tests::invalid_h256 ... ok
<snip>
test encode::tests::test_encode_length ... ok
test encode::impls::tests::vec_of_vec_of_u8 ... ok
test encode::tests::test_encode_length_above_max_debug_panics - should panic ... ok

test result: ok. 27 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 0.00s

     Running tests/tests.rs (target/debug/deps/tests-f8fb1f9ccb197bf4)

running 20 tests
test round_trip::bool ... ok
test round_trip::first_offset_skips_byte ... ok
test round_trip::fixed_len_excess_bytes ... ok
<snip>
test round_trip::vec_u16 ... ok
test round_trip::vec_of_vec_u16 ... ok

test result: ok. 20 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 0.00s

   Doc-tests ssz

running 3 tests
test src/decode.rs - decode::SszDecoder (line 258) ... ok
test src/encode.rs - encode::SszEncoder (line 57) ... ok
test src/lib.rs - (line 10) ... ok

test result: ok. 3 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 0 filtered out; finished in 0.15s$ cargo test -p eth2_ssz

test_logger

The test_logger, located in /common/logging/ can be used to create a Logger that by default returns a NullLogger. But if --features 'logging/test_logger' is passed while testing the logs are displayed. This can be very helpful while debugging tests.

Example:

$ cargo test -p beacon_chain validator_pubkey_cache::test::basic_operation --features 'logging/test_logger'
    Finished test [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.20s
     Running unittests (target/debug/deps/beacon_chain-975363824f1143bc)

running 1 test
Sep 19 19:23:25.192 INFO Beacon chain initialized, head_slot: 0, head_block: 0x2353…dcf4, head_state: 0xef4b…4615, module: beacon_chain::builder:649
Sep 19 19:23:25.192 INFO Saved beacon chain to disk, module: beacon_chain::beacon_chain:3608
Sep 19 19:23:26.798 INFO Beacon chain initialized, head_slot: 0, head_block: 0x2353…dcf4, head_state: 0xef4b…4615, module: beacon_chain::builder:649
Sep 19 19:23:26.798 INFO Saved beacon chain to disk, module: beacon_chain::beacon_chain:3608
Sep 19 19:23:28.407 INFO Beacon chain initialized, head_slot: 0, head_block: 0xdcdd…501f, head_state: 0x3055…032c, module: beacon_chain::builder:649
Sep 19 19:23:28.408 INFO Saved beacon chain to disk, module: beacon_chain::beacon_chain:3608
Sep 19 19:23:30.069 INFO Beacon chain initialized, head_slot: 0, head_block: 0xa739…1b22, head_state: 0xac1c…eab6, module: beacon_chain::builder:649
Sep 19 19:23:30.069 INFO Saved beacon chain to disk, module: beacon_chain::beacon_chain:3608
test validator_pubkey_cache::test::basic_operation ... ok

test result: ok. 1 passed; 0 failed; 0 ignored; 0 measured; 51 filtered out; finished in 6.46s

Consensus Spec Tests

The ethereum/consensus-spec-tests repository contains a large set of tests that verify Lighthouse behaviour against the Ethereum Foundation specifications.

These tests are quite large (100's of MB) so they're only downloaded if you run $ make test-ef (or anything that runs it). You may want to avoid downloading these tests if you're on a slow or metered Internet connection. CI will require them to pass, though.

Local Testnets

During development and testing it can be useful to start a small, local testnet.

The scripts/local_testnet/ directory contains several scripts and a README that should make this process easy.