In the past year, a slew of new projects and services have sprung up supporting the Liquid Network. Development efforts are certainly ramping up and now, more than ever is it easier to start building on Liquid.
However, manually setting up a test environment for Liquid can be somewhat tedious with the different configuration files, daemons, separate communication ports, and CLI commands. Developers interested in testing out Liquid likely just want a quick and easy way to start testing or developing. Nigiri is from the team at Vulpem, a technology R&D lab, and is a great tool that helps speed up the setup process so you can get to testing within a few minutes!
What is Nigiri?
Nirigi is a command-line utility that spins up a personal Bitcoin and Liquid regtest network complete with bitcoind, elementsd (for Liquid testing), and a Blockstream Esplora instance (which includes an Electrum server and a block explorer).
With Nigiri, it’s possible to automate regtest block creation and regtest BTC/L-BTC creation, explore blocks and transactions with the Esplora frontend, and even issue new assets using Nigiri’s simplified commands.
The only prerequisite to running Nigiri is installing Docker; ideally with non-root user permissions since this will just be a testing environment. It’s also a good idea to install both Docker and Nigiri inside of a virtual machine using something like Virtualbox just to make it easier to delete everything and restart if you want to.
Once you’ve got Docker installed, continue on to the excellent guide created by the Bitcoin Developer Network for getting Nigiri installed and running.
Best Served With Coach
As a supplement to your own local test environment, you should also head over to Liquid.Coach. Liquid.Coach — also from Vulpem — is a browser-based tool which enables you to check the balance of a Liquid address, create and import a PSET (Partial Signed Elements Transaction), and sign a PSET entirely using your browser. It’s a great way to poke around with the technology available on the Liquid Network. You can even use your own local Nigiri instance by clicking the “Explorer” button at the top left and inputting localhost:3001 .
Join the Conversation
If you’re interested in learning more about Liquid, Elements, and sidechain development, you can join the discussion on a variety of platforms. We’d love to hear about what you’re working on or have planned!
Telegram: https://t.me/liquid_community
Slack: #Elements channel on the Bitcoin Core Community Slack
IRC: #sidechains-dev on Freenode
Twitter: @Liquid_BTC
Note: This blog was originally posted at https://medium.com/blockstream/spin-up-a-local-liquid-test-environment-with-nigiri-bb368af3ed66