How do I setup and run a custom network for testing purposes?

Question

I am working on a user level tutorial for ‘how to write and introduce a Tezos protocol’. I want to offer people a couple ways of testing it. One of those being running an isolated testnet and upgrading to the custom protocol from whatever protocol is being ran on mainnet.

I am using https://tezos.gitlab.io/user/multinetwork.html#custom-networks as my primary resource.

Is this all I need to do? :

• edit src/bin_node/node_config_file.ml

  • Copy and paste where mainnet is defined
  • Change the network name
  • Change the bootstrap peers
  • On custom node startup use data-dir and --network

What I would like to do if feasible is: Spin up three nodes in the cloud, make a custom network running the Hang2 protocol ( with custom parameters to speed up the network )… let the nodes bootstrap off of each other. Do some test transactions, then inject the custom protocol and simulate the governance cycles on the network for and pass the protocol.

I want to do this because as a user this just makes the most sense for testing that the protocol will at least upgrade fine before injecting it on mainnet ( if one so chose ).

Answer 1

I want to do this because as a user this just makes the most sense for testing that the protocol will at least upgrade fine before injecting it on mainnet ( if one so chose ).

You don't need a test network to test the protocol migration. The relevant doc is here.

The main drawback for testing on a test network is that the state of the chain (which is called the "context") on which the migration is run is very different from mainnet. We cannot foresee 3 months in advance what the mainnet context will be but migrating from today's mainnet context is usually a much better test than migrating from an almost empty Hangzhou context.

If you still want to run a test network, have a look at the work on Kubernets from Midl-dev and Oxhead Alpha.