Spinning up Polkadot

How to spin up the Polkadot Relay chain locally

Perhaps the simplest workflow a developer would want is to spin up a local Polkadot network.

With Pop CLI this can be done.

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

touch network.toml

[relaychain]
chain = "polkadot-local"

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

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

This is specifying a network configuration using the polkadot-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
│  ⛓️ polkadot-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 Polkadot network running locally!

For more network configurations:

• 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