testing

Consensus integration testbed

This package contains an integration testing suite designed to test interactions between the chain component, and the consensus. It is specifically designed to remove as many peripherals as possible in order to fully isolate and properly test these two components, so that we can easily catch race conditions, corner cases and bugs alike.

How it works

The integrating testing suite entirely bypasses the network layer, and thus does not use anything in the peer package. Instead, all nodes which participate will share a single event bus, which facilitates all communication. In order to re-propagate topics.Gossip messages to other peers, a small utility has been introduced - the gossipRouter, which catches any gossiped messages, decodes them, and publishes them on the event bus. This way, all communications are locally contained, and subject to minimal latency and ambiguity of delivery.

As you can see, the consensus is still ran separately for each node, however, the communication channels are shared to facilitate extra simplicity to the integration testing suite. A node in this testing suite simply consists of a chain.Chain, which holds a loop.Consensus. Therefore, we are fully able to test the interaction of these two components. The chain.Chain will update the caller of the progress in the consensus, by using the AcceptedBlock topic.

How to use

Currently, there are only two configurable aspects of the integration testing suite:

• The amount of nodes
• The amount of rounds it is supposed to run for

Since the only test is currently purely to see if nodes can reach a certain point in the consensus, there is not much extra configurability.

To configure the amount of nodes, simply set the DUSK_TESTBED_NUM_NODES environment variable. To configure the amount of rounds, set the DUSK_TESTBED_NUM_ROUNDS environment variable.

$ export DUSK_TESTBED_NUM_NODES=10
$ export DUSK_TESTBED_NUM_ROUNDS=10

Future work

This integration testing suite is currently quite simplistic, but should be easily extendable and updatable in the future, once the need for more test cases arises.