Hello everyone! It has been four months since we published our very first version IoTeX Network Explorer in Testnet Alpha: Strive release. With the help of our beloved community who tested and reported issues, and the hard work from our engineering team, now we are happy to announce the IoTeX Network Explorer has been fully open-sourced on GitHub! Working with iotex-core, this repo allows everyone to connect the existing node/port to a self-built Explorer and monitor blockchain activities at the front end!
What is IoTeX Explorer?
The IoTeX Explorer is a front-end visualization tool to detail key metrics related to the IoTeX Testnet, as well as to articulate how the Roll-DPoS consensus mechanism and delegate voting process operates. The current code base is run inside docker containers deployed on the digital ocean, where we simulate token transfers and voting across candidates and delegates per epoch, communicating over a P2P network. We are also able to add any number of full nodes and light nodes to the Testnet, but we focus on the candidates and delegates in this visualization tool. So in short — the IoTeX Explorer visualizes the block, transfer, and voting history of IoTeX’s Testnet. You can see a detailed demo of the IoTeX Explorer in our Strive demo video.
Why Open Source?
By the time we released our Testnet Beta version, we have heard from many of you asking about how to participate in our tech development, build & test your own network/applications based on our platform. It fully aligns with our previous approach in Testnet Beta, to bring usabilities as the bridge between users, developer and IoTeX, and try our best to provide more handful tools/resources for our community to learn, test and play.
In the past few months, we stay active on GitHub and would love to make IoTeX Explorer a successful open source project, where you can learn how we built the current Explorer portal and try on your own — providing a way we can collaborate with the community to make IoTeX network benefit for everyone.
How to Play with it?
In our previous open sourced repo: iotexproject/iotex-core, we have introduced how to implement IoTeX protocol with the repo we open-sourced. Everyone is welcomed to run the code under the components minimum requirements to build your own node on IoTeX network.
Check - GitHub - iotexproject/iotex-core: Official implementation of IoTeX blockchain protocol in Go.
In the IoTeX network, the explorer runs as a full node so that it will communicate with other nodes in the network to keep updating the chain database. Then, it reads from the database and replies to the client via JSON-RPC.
RFC iotex-explorer Architecture
Now with the Explorer repo on GitHub, you can build your own explorer and connect it with the existing node/port, to monitor the blockchain status and inspect transaction details at the front end website. It is to say, now you are able to check the activities of your own node in a more visualized way! Please find detailed instructions in the README file.
Explorer is only the first step — We will gradually open source more project codes to enable multiple features for our community to test and use, as well as making a contribution to the blockchain development. Please stay tuned to our future announcements!
Code Contributions — We Need Your Help!
Currently, our repo is still in the alpha stage with limited features supported and is subjected to rapid change. Contributions to help IoTeX reach its full potential, including style/bug fixes, feature recommendations, proposals for schemes/algorithms, and help with documentation, are all welcomed and greatly appreciated. For code contributions, please refer to our Contribution Guidelines for more information. To report issues, please file an issue on our Github page.
As we are stepping into the Mainnet building stage, we will begin our Developer Bounty Campaigns soon to build and improve the IoTeX network together. Make sure you have followed us on our Telegram, Twitter and subscribe to our newsletters to receive the latest announcement for that!