gkhays / ethereum-poc

How to set up an Ethereum environment including client and server. Uses the go-ethereum server and the Mist client.

Blockchain Transactions

The purpose of this project is to demonstrate the ability to record identity-related transactions on a private blockchain. An initial idea was to record actions or events associated with entitlements. However, a more pertinent scenario is to record an identity governance review on the blockchain.

The Ethereum Project seems like a good place to start since it supports so called "smart contracts" and was designed for uses other than pure digital cash transactions such as Bitcoin. I chose the Golang implementation, go-ethereum.

Ethereum Quick Start

See the wiki pages for this repostitory for more detail: wiki pages.

Quick bash script to start go-ethereum. The default ports are fine.

RPC Port: default: 8545
Port default: 30303

# geth.sh
# Fetch local IP address into a variable.
MY_IP=$(ip addr list enp0s25 | grep "inet " | cut -d' ' -f6 | cut -d/ -f1)

# --testnet and --dev are mutually exclusive
~/src/ethereum/go-ethereum/build/bin/geth \
  --testnet --identity "IGBlock" \
  --rpc --rpcaddr "$MY_IP" --rpccorsdomain "*" \
  --nodiscover --rpcapi "db,eth,net,web3" console

This creates a blockchain on the Ethereum TEST-NET. It is possible to create a private blockchain as well using the --networkid 1999 switch. See Setting up a local private testnet for more detail.

REST Client

Since go-ethereum supports a JSON-RPC interface, I use the Chrome DHC extension (similar to Postman) as a RESTful client.

Mist

Ethereum also supports a rich, native client based on Meteor called Mist. You may recognize Meteor as the Rocket.Chat native application is based on it as well.

To get Mist to connect to your private blockchain, use the --rpc command line switch, e.g.

Mist.exe --rpc http://10.45.14.31:8545

Windows users may set up a shortcut for the Mist application.

Here you can see the blockchain and the Ether that has been "mined" so far.