Running on Paseo locally

The guide is for running a parachain on a local Paseo TestNet

Paseo is the community-run Polkadot Relay chain TestNet.

Note: For contrast, Rococo is the Parity-run Polkadot Relay chain TestNet which will be deprecating in favour of the Paseo TestNet.

A good development workflow:

1. Run your parachain locally on Paseo TestNet for development purposes

2. When ready to test in a live environment with other parachains, deploy on the live Paseo TestNet.

Let's get started.

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

The pop up parachain command can help with this.

pop up parachain --help

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.

[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 the Polkadot Relay chain 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.

Note: The default_command is using release and not debug. If you are developing, you may want to switch the path to use debug.

Cool. Let's spin this up!

pop up parachain -f ./network.toml

If this is the first time you are running the pop up command, you will be prompted 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