RIF Relay Installation Requirements

Requirements

To have the RIF Relay System running locally there are some tools that are required. All of these tools are open source and have their own support page. The functionality of RIF Relay does not depend on these technologies and could be updated or replaced, if necessary.

RSK Node

You need to have a running RSK node version RSKj. It is recommended to use the latest released version.

The node can be run locally or using docker.

When running a local RSKj node, we can configure the node to connect to a specific network; in this guide we will use Regtest and Testnet.

Node & NPM

The Node version used is v16.

We recommend the use of nvm. After the installation process you can execute the following commands to use node version 16.

nvm install 16
nvm use  16

If you choose to use node without nvm, you can find the installation instructions at Node's website.

You can check the installation by running node -v.

Hardhat

An important tool we use for interacting with the blockchain is Hardhat version v2.10.2.

You can follow the installation guide in the Hardhat official website.

Run all hardhat commands with the prefix npx. This is to execute node packages using the project's version.

Check if the installation was successful by running npx hardhat version in your terminal.

The configuration file is hardhat.config.ts. Please see Harhats's documentation for details about this file and how to use it.

Using Docker

We recommend following the official documentation for installing Docker and keeping it updated.

You'll need to install both docker as well as docker-compose.

The RIF Relay components can be deployed using Docker or locally using Hardhat

A guide for the RIF Relay Server can be found in the repository.

Running on macOS

To run the project using Docker on a Mac, please do the following:

• Patch readlink

The startup scripts assume that GNU's readlink command is available. But MacOS ships with BSD's readlink, which is incompatible with GNU's version. So we must patch readlink. This can be done using Homebrew as follows:

brew install coreutils
ln -s /usr/local/bin/greadlink /usr/local/bin/readlink

After this step, ensure that the PATH variable gives priority to /usr/local/bin over /usr/bin. You can check this with which readlink, which should output /usr/local/bin/readlink. Alternatively, try executing readlink -f ., if it works, you're ok.

Ethers

The interaction with the blockchain is done using Ethers v5.