Abacus

Overview

Abacus is an interchain messaging protocol that allows applications to communicate between blockchains.

Developers can use Abacus to share state between blockchains, allowing them to build interchain applications that live natively across multiple chains.

To read more about interchain applications, how the protocol works, and how to integrate with Abacus, please see the documentation.

Working on Abacus

Workspaces

This monorepo uses Yarn Workspaces. Installing dependencies, building, testing, and running prettier for all packages can be done from the root directory of the repository.

• Installing dependencies

  yarn install
  

• Building

  yarn build
  

If you are using VSCode, you can launch the multi-root workspace with code mono.code-workspace, install the recommended workspace extensions, and use the editor settings.

Rust

• install rustup
• see rust/README.md

Running Agents Locally

See this guide for how to run the agents locally and perform a full end-to-end test.

Building Agent Images

There exists a docker build for the agent binaries. These docker images are used for deploying the agents in a production environment.

cd rust
./build.sh <image_tag>
./release.sh <image_tag>

Deploy Procedure

The contract addresses of each deploy can be found in rust/config. The latest deploy will be at rust/config/[latest timestamp] with bridge contracts within that same folder under /bridge/[latest timestamp].

The agents are set up to point at one environment at a time.

When agents are deployed to point at a new environment, they cease to point at the old ones. We do not continue to operate off-chain agents on old contract deploys. Contracts not supported by the agents will cease to function (i.e. messages will not be relayed between chains).

Off-chain agents are not automatically re-deployed when new contract deploys are merged. Auto-redeploys will be implemented at some future date.

Publishing Packages

Packages can be versioned and published all at once with commands from the root.

First, increment the version to the desired value:

# An example of a prerelease version
yarn version:prepare 0.5.0-beta0
# Or for a release which increments the minor version
yarn version:prepare minor

Next, ensure packages are cleaned and rebuilt:

yarn clean && yarn build

Finally, publish the packages to NPM

# Note: If you have not yet logged in, first run yarn npm login
yarn publish:all --otp YOUR_OTP_HERE