Spinning up Kusama

How to spin up the Kusama Relay chain locally

Use Pop CLI to spin up Kusama locally!

First, create the following network.toml file in your project's root directory.

touch network.toml

[relaychain]
chain = "kusama-local"

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

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

This is specifying a network configuration using the kusama-local chain along with two validator nodes to run the network: alice and bob.

Let's run it.

pop up parachain -f ./network.toml

It may take some time if it prompts you to download the binaries. Grab some coffee.

Eventually, you will get output like so:

┌   Pop CLI : Deploy a parachain
│
◇  🚀 Network launched successfully - ctrl-c to terminate
│  ⛓️ kusama-local
│       alice:
│         portal: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=ws://127.0.0.1:62715#/explorer
│         logs: tail -f /var/folders/vl/txnq6gdj22s9rn296z0md27w0000gn/T/zombie-2957639d-9818-43e5-8a1d-db85ad27fea2/alice/alice.log
│       bob:
│         portal: https://polkadot.js.org/apps/?rpc=ws://127.0.0.1:62719#/explorer
│         logs: tail -f /var/folders/vl/txnq6gdj22s9rn296z0md27w0000gn/T/zombie-2957639d-9818-43e5-8a1d-db85ad27fea2/bob/bob.log

Congrats! You now have a Kusama network running locally!

Several other network configurations are available:

• https://github.com/r0gue-io/pop-cli/tree/main/tests/networks

For more advanced options, such as specifying the Relay chain version, run the following command:

pop up parachain --help

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