Launch a Chain in Development

To run your parachain, you will need to spin up a local network with your parachain configuration.

The pop up command can help with this.

pop up network --help

For Pop CLI versions <0.7.0 the pop up network command is pop up parachain

Say we want to spin up a local network for your parachain. First we need to define a zombienet network configuration file. You can do this in the root of your project.

cd my-appchain
touch network.toml

Add the following configuration, adapting as necessary.

You can use paseo-local for your Relay chain. Paseo is the community-led Polkadot Test Relay chain.

[relaychain]
chain = "paseo-local"

[[relaychain.nodes]]
name = "alice"
validator = true

[[relaychain.nodes]]
name = "bob"
validator = true

[[parachains]]
id = 2000
default_command = "./target/release/parachain-template-node"

[[parachains.collators]]
name = "collator-01"

This network configuration will launch a relay chain using a paseo-local instance of Polkadot with two validator nodes to run the network: alice and bob. It will also run parachain-template-node with one collator node named collator-01.

Cool. Let's spin this up, ensuring that your parachain binary has been built using pop build parachain.

pop up network -f ./network.toml

If this is the first time you are running the pop up command, it will prompt you to source the required Polkadot binaries. This will take some time, grab some coffee.

Once all the binaries are sourced, you should have output similar to this.

┌   Pop CLI : Deploy a parachain
│
◇  🚀 Network launched successfully - ctrl-c to terminate
│  ⛓️ paseo-local
│       alice:
│         portal: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=ws://127.0.0.1:62551#/explorer
│         logs: tail -f /var/folders/vl/txnq6gdj22s9rn296z0md27w0000gn/T/zombie-c0eb16fc-5d11-4792-aced-493ef972d056/alice/alice.log
│       bob:
│         portal: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=ws://127.0.0.1:62555#/explorer
│         logs: tail -f /var/folders/vl/txnq6gdj22s9rn296z0md27w0000gn/T/zombie-c0eb16fc-5d11-4792-aced-493ef972d056/bob/bob.log
│  ⛓️ local_testnet: 2000
│       collator-01:
│         portal: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=ws://127.0.0.1:62559#/explorer
│         logs: tail -f /var/folders/vl/txnq6gdj22s9rn296z0md27w0000gn/T/zombie-c0eb16fc-5d11-4792-aced-493ef972d056/collator-01/collator-01.log
│

Congrats! You have now spun up a network with your parachain running!

Under-the-hood, Pop CLI uses zombienet to spin up the network. For more advanced network configurations and options consult the zombienet repo

Learning Resources

• 🧑‍🏫 To learn about Polkadot in general, Polkadot.network website is a good starting point.

  • ⭕ Learn more about parachains here.

• 🧑‍🔧 For technical introduction, here are the Polkadot SDK documentation resources.

Technical Support

• Polkadot Stack Exchange

  • Create a question and tag it with "pop"

  • Share the StackExchange question in our Pop Support Telegram channel