ADR 16: Self-contained cardano-node emulator component

Date: 2022-11-23

Author(s)

koslambrou <konstantinos.lambrou@iohk.io>

Status

Draft

Context

The current plutus-contract Haskell package allows developers to write Plutus applications using the Contract Monad. On top of that, the package contains a Plutus application contract emulator, a way to run those contracts on a simulated environment so that they can be tested. The emulator in question contains multiple components like the testing framework (including the ContractModel), the wallet emulator, a chain-index emulator and the node emulator.:

 +-------------------+     +-------------------+     +-----------------+
 | Testing framework |<----+ Contract Emulator +---->| Wallet emulator |
 +-------------------+     +-----+--------+----+     +--------+--------+
                                 |        |                   |
                                 |        |                   v
+----------------------+         |        |           +---------------+
| Chain index emulator |<--------+        +---------->| Node emulator |
+----------------------+                              +---------------+

The main reason we can’t use a real wallet or node backend is because they are not fast enough to be able to run many test cases using property tests with the ContractModel.

Now, we believe the node emulator to be a useful separate component that other testing framework can leverage for being able to write fast test cases.

Decision

  • We will create a new Haskell package named cardano-node-emulator.

  • We will move node related functionality into this new package. Here are some modules (or parts of a module) that will need to be moved over.

    • The Ledger.Validation module which validates transactions using cardano-ledger should only be used by cardano-node-emulator and should not be exposed.

    • The Ledger.Fee module, which calculates the fees for a given transaction, should be internal to cardano-node-emulator.

    • The Ledger.Generators module, which contains generators for constructing blockchains and transactions for use in property-based testing, should be internal to cardano-node-emulator.

    • The Ledger.TimeSlot.SlotConfig datatype should only be used by the cardano-node-emulator. An end user should not use this representation in a real world scenario. See ADR 15: Time conversion semantic change for more details.

    • The Wallet.Emulator.Chain module in plutus-contract should be moved in cardano-node-emulator.

    • The Ledger.Params which allows to configuration the network parameters should be moved over to cardano-node-emulator.

Argument

Splitting out the node emulator in a separate Haskell component allows to better scope it’s dependency footprint. We don’t want the list of dependencies to be too large in order to keep it as a lightweight component.

Notes

This ADR is addressed in PR #831.