Book Image

Blockchain Developer's Guide

By : Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Blockchain Developer's Guide

By: Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Blockchain applications provide a single-shared ledger to eliminate trust issues involving multiple stakeholders. It is the main technical innovation of Bitcoin, where it serves as the public ledger for Bitcoin transactions. Blockchain Developer's Guide takes you through the electrifying world of blockchain technology. It begins with the basic design of a blockchain and elaborates concepts, such as Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), tokens, smart contracts, and other related terminologies. You will then explore the components of Ethereum, such as Ether tokens, transactions, and smart contracts that you need to build simple DApps. Blockchain Developer's Guide also explains why you must specifically use Solidity for Ethereum-based projects and lets you explore different blockchains with easy-to-follow examples. You will learn a wide range of concepts - beginning with cryptography in cryptocurrencies and including ether security, mining, and smart contracts. You will learn how to use web sockets and various API services for Ethereum. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be able to build efficient decentralized applications. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Blockchain Quick Reference by Brenn Hill, Samanyu Chopra, Paul Valencourt • Building Blockchain Projects by Narayan Prusty
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

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...