Book Image

Building Blockchain Projects

By : Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Building Blockchain Projects

By: Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain is a decentralized ledger that maintains a continuously growing list of data records that are secured from tampering and revision. Every user is allowed to connect to the network, send new transactions to it, verify transactions, and create new blocks, making it permission-less. This book will teach you what blockchain is, how it maintains data integrity, and how to create real-world blockchain projects using Ethereum. With interesting real-world projects, you will learn how to write smart contracts which run exactly as programmed without any chance of fraud, censorship, or third-party interference, and build end-to-e applications for blockchain. You will learn about concepts such as cryptography in cryptocurrencies, ether security, mining, smart contracts, solidity, and more. You will also learn about web sockets, various API services for Ethereum, and much more. The blockchain is the main technical innovation of bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for bitcoin transactions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Exploring ethereumjs-testrpc


ethereumjs-testrpc is a Node.js-based Ethereum node used for testing and development. It simulates full-node behavior and makes the development of Ethereum applications much faster. It also includes all popular RPC functions and features (such as events) and can be run deterministically to make development a breeze.

It's written in JavaScript and is distributed as an npm package. At the time of writing this, the latest version of ethereumjs-testrpc is 3.0.3 and requires at least Node.js version 6.9.1 to run properly.

Note

It holds everything in memory; therefore, whenever the node is restarted, it loses the previous state.

Installation and usage

There are three ways to simulate an Ethereum node using ethereumjs-testrpc. Each of these ways has its own use cases. Let's explore them.

The testrpc command-line application

The testrpc command can be used to simulate an Ethereum node. To install this command-line app, you need to install ethereumjs-testrpc globally:

npm install...