Development Environment Setup

Follow this guide to get a Lighthouse development environment up-and-running.

See the Quick instructions for a summary or the Detailed instructions for clarification.

Quick instructions

Install Rust + Cargo with rustup.
Install build dependencies using your package manager.
- $ <package-manager> clang protobuf libssl-dev cmake
Clone the sigp/lighthouse.
In the root of the repo, run the tests with cargo test --all --release.
Then, build the binaries with cargo build --all --release.
Lighthouse is now fully built and tested.

Note: first-time compilation may take several minutes.

Detailed instructions

A fully-featured development environment can be achieved with the following steps:

Install rustup.
Use the command rustup show to get information about the Rust installation. You should see that the active tool-chain is the stable version.
- Updates can be performed using rustup update, Lighthouse generally requires a recent version of Rust.
Install build dependencies (Arch packages are listed here, your distribution will likely be similar):
- clang: required by RocksDB.
- protobuf: required for protobuf serialization (gRPC)
- libssl-dev: also gRPC
- cmake: required for building protobuf
Clone the repository with submodules: git clone https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse.
Change directory to the root of the repository.
Run the test suite with cargo test --all --release. The build and test process can take several minutes. If you experience any failures on master, please raise an issue.

Notes:

Lighthouse targets Rust stable but generally runs on nightly too.

Note for Windows users:

Perl may also be required to build lighthouse. You can install Strawberry Perl, or alternatively use a choco install command choco install strawberryperl.

Additionally, the dependency protoc-grpcio v0.3.1 is reported to have issues compiling in Windows. You can specify a known working version by editing version in protos/Cargo.toml section to protoc-grpcio = "<=0.3.0".

eth2.0-spec-tests

The ethereum/eth2.0-spec-tests repository contains a large set of tests that verify Lighthouse behaviour against the Ethereum Foundation specifications.

The tests/ef_tests crate runs these tests and it has some interesting behaviours:

If the tests/ef_tests/eth2.0-spec-tests directory is not present, all tests indicate a pass when they did not actually run.
If that directory is present, the tests are executed faithfully, failing if a discrepancy is found.

The tests/ef_tests/eth2.0-spec-tests directory is not present by default. To obtain it, use the Makefile in the root of the repository:

make ef_tests

Note: this will download 100+ MB of test files from the ethereum/eth2.0-spec-tests.

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