Need a simnet harness

[buck54321]

Examples

• https://github.com/decred/dcrstakepool/blob/master/harness.sh
• https://gist.github.com/davecgh/3da3c48bd9ab1914ff134c0b26b8661c
• https://github.com/buck54321/dcrdex/blob/dcrwallet/dex/testing/dcr/harness.sh

Script will need to fire up dcrd, dcrdata, dcrstakepool/stakepoold. Ports chosen for the various RPCs can be hard-coded into the TD network configuration settings for simnet.

[teknico]

This risks being a fairly large DevOps job.

The two main dependencies are dcrdata and dcrstakepool.

dcrdata has the following runtime dependencies:

• dcrd
• PostgreSQL

and no deployment script.

dcrstakepool has the following runtime dependencies:

• stakepoold
• dcrd
• dcrwallet
• MySQL

and a simnet deployment script (first example in this issue). However, the script lists quite a few installation and configuration assumptions, which make running it a fairly large manual job.

How far down the rabbit hole do we want to go? How much of the whole process do we want to automate?

Even if we stop somewhere mid-way, this does not look like a job for a few shell scripts. For productivity, maintanability and robustness reasons, I would at least write it in Python with the help of Plumbum and libtmux.

However, depending again on how extensively we want to automate the process, we might want to employ a more powerful tool like Ansible.

Then there's the question of whether we're going to use container tools like Docker.

All this would be easier if each tool and platform already had its own automated deployment we could reuse. I'm wary of scope creep though, and we do need to start somewhere.

[JoeGruffins]

I agree with @teknico
The dcrstakepool script is actually for testnet. We don't run it on simnet. It's missing that configuration.

edit:
decred/dcrstakepool#591

[buck54321]

You guys are thinking too hard on this. We already have the scripts written in about three other Decred projects. Not every dev is expected to run these, they won't run with github actions, and we don't have to have a VSP instance to get most testing done. Other than VSP, this issue should be resolved in an hour or two of work.