test-network

Running the test network

You can use the ./network.sh script to stand up a simple Fabric test network. The test network has two peer organizations with one peer each and a single node raft ordering service. You can also use the ./network.sh script to create channels and deploy chaincode. For more information, see Using the Fabric test network. The test network is being introduced in Fabric v2.0 as the long term replacement for the first-network sample.

If you are planning to run the test network with consensus type BFT then please pass -bft flag as input to the network.sh script when creating the channel. Note that currently this sample does not yet support the use of consensus type BFT and CA together. That is to create a network use:

./network.sh up -bft

To create a channel use:

./network.sh createChannel -bft

To restart a running network use:

./network.sh restart -bft

Note that running the createChannel command will start the network, if it is not already running.

Before you can deploy the test network, you need to follow the instructions to Install the Samples, Binaries and Docker Images in the Hyperledger Fabric documentation.

Using the Peer commands

The setOrgEnv.sh script can be used to set up the environment variables for the organizations, this will help to be able to use the peer commands directly.

First, ensure that the peer binaries are on your path, and the Fabric Config path is set assuming that you're in the test-network directory.

 export PATH=$PATH:$(realpath ../bin)
 export FABRIC_CFG_PATH=$(realpath ../config)

You can then set up the environment variables for each organization. The ./setOrgEnv.sh command is designed to be run as follows.

export $(./setOrgEnv.sh Org2 | xargs)

(Note bash v4 is required for the scripts.)

You will now be able to run the peer commands in the context of Org2. If a different command prompt, you can run the same command with Org1 instead. The setOrgEnv script outputs a series of <name>=<value> strings. These can then be fed into the export command for your current shell.

Chaincode-as-a-service

To learn more about how to use the improvements to the Chaincode-as-a-service please see this tutorial. It is expected that this will move to augment the tutorial in the Hyperledger Fabric ReadTheDocs

Podman

Note - podman support should be considered experimental but the following has been reported to work with podman 4.1.1 on Mac. If you wish to use podman a LinuxVM is recommended.

Fabric's install-fabric.sh script has been enhanced to support using podman to pull down images and tag them rather than docker. The images are the same, just pulled differently. Simply specify the 'podman' argument when running the install-fabric.sh script.

Similarly, the network.sh script has been enhanced so that it can use podman and podman-compose instead of docker. Just set the environment variable CONTAINER_CLI to podman before running the network.sh script:

CONTAINER_CLI=podman ./network.sh up

As there is no Docker-Daemon when using podman, only the ./network.sh deployCCAAS command will work. Following the Chaincode-as-a-service Tutorial above should work.