ZombieNet registry

Tech Talk
1

Hey All,

I want to open the discussion around a great idea proposed by @crystalin in Is ZombieNet going to provide a centralized parachain registry · Issue #258 · paritytech/zombienet · GitHub for ZombieNet.

Let me first make a quick intro,

ZombieNet aims to be a testing framework for substrate based blockchains, providing a simple cli tool that allow users to spawn and test ephemeral networks. The tool allows for spawning a relay chain with one or several parachains.

The idea is to provide a registry where the parachain teams can provide the information of their releases and keep it updated, so zombienet can improve the experience of spawning a new network with multiple parachains (either with the current toml config or using cli arguments). Teams would therefore be able to spawn these local networks with real parachains.

To make this registry useful, we need at least a link to the release image (for k8s/podman providers) and a link to download the binary to use the native provider. Some extra information may also be needed. After exploring this idea internally we thought that the best way to move forward is to keep the information inside the zombienet repository in a json file and ask the teams to open a PR to update the information. I also think that maintaining the info (links) of old releases could be nice to probe between different versions.

At the moment, we are currently in the exploring phase and we hope to give shape to this new feature in the upcoming months with the collected feedback from the community.

Thanks!

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2

At composable, we’re using Nix to achieve something similar: GitHub - ComposableFi/composable: Infrastructure for natively cross-chain applications. We can spin up networks based of branches and commit hashes for each PR. Right now we have parachains pinned to commit hashes, but working on making that configurable too. Other teams here use it for Cosmos and NEAR as well, and has been working like a charm.

If zombienet’s supports nix-flakes, then there is no need for a registry. Other parachain teams would just include a flake.nix in their repository root.

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We started to investigate how to setup our infrastructure to include ZombieNet. There are still some changes that we will suggest but I think it is the right direction.

I don’t think it will be easy to support such a granularity like specifying hash/pr directly, but the goal is to provide a broader ecosystem in a test framework.

What I would love to see included is a suite of tests that would be completed by each team to include their cross-chain scenarios.

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