Substrate debug-kit 🛠⚙️

A collection of debug tools and libraries around substrate chains.

This project has evolved from the historical name offline-phragmen. I first created this repo prior to Kusama's NPoS enabling as a tool to predict the outcome. Henceforth, it has evolved into this repo. This functionality is still provided in the offline-elections crate.

DEPRECATED 🚨

Almost all of the tools in this repository are no longer maintained. Some are moved to substrate (e.g. remote-externalities. Some are being re-worked in Typescript, and some are scheduled to be re-done with Frame's new Metadata.

Overview

• sub-storage: This is the backbone of all of the crates in this repo. It provides a minimal wrapper around substrate's storage rpc call for easier use. It provides all you need to read any module's storage items, constants, and metadata. All of this is independent of any chain or pallet and should work in any substrate chain. Additionally, it provide some pallet-dependent helpers as well under the helpers feature (such as reading identity of an account).
• sub-du: a disk-usage-like tool that prints the storage usage of a chain. It reads all the info it needs from metadata, so independent chain or runtime. Arguably not super useful, but I find it cool.
• offline-elections: The historical main purpose of this repo. It can scrape the staking module's info and run election algorithms of sp-npos-elections offline. Given the correct parameters, it can be used to predict the next validator set. It also provide other election related functionalities. See the sub-commands for more info.
• remote-externalities: It provides the ability to write simple rust unit tests over a specific state of a chain. It can be very useful to debug breaking changes and storage migrations.
• tokens: Quite a dumb and small crate that provides wrappers for easy pretty-printing tokens like DOT. Somewhat similar to the toHuman() interface of the javascript API.
• laboratory: This is where I try new stuff.

Build Substrate Debug Kit

• git clone https://github.com/paritytech/substrate-debug-kit/
• cd substrate-debug-kit
• cargo build --release

Example commands for the debug tools

Note: Run local Polkadot or Kusama node, or start local development node e.g. polkadot --dev --tmp

• The sub-du command to read all of the chain storage usage ./target/release/sub-du
• The offline-election tool for staking ./target/release/offline-election staking -i 10 -r
• The offline-election tool to review a validator ./target/release/offline-election validator-check --who CpYNXnYC1mPPRSXMHvm9EUuhEqHjvj6kCN4kshqMdEpPYSF

Brain Dump 🧠

• Substrate module sidecar: A wrapper around remote-externalities that allows you to run a substrate module in a TextExternalities environment and constantly feed the new block data into it. Would need to listen to new blocks, upon each block:
  1. call Module::on_initialize().
  2. scan for any transaction in that block that might be targeted to this module (how? call matching), call them directly
  3. call Module::on_finalize().
  4. Wipe the state and update it to the new state of the newly imported block.

Notes: will probably be a pain to do because of rust dependency clashes. Using wasm would make this easier, but then debugging will become harder.