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Amareleo-Chain vs SnarkOS

amareleo-chain looks and feels very similar to running snarkOS with devnet.sh

Here is a quick comparison:

  • amareleo-chain is functionally equivalent to running four snarkOS validators in a single process. where snarkOS would be started with the --dev <n> --network 1 arguments.

  • amareleo-chain only requires a single port, for its REST server (default: 3030), unless the metrics server is enabled (default: 9000).

  • amareleo-chain supports three commands: start, clean and update. The clean and update commands are identical in functionality to the snarkOS clean and update commands.

  • amareleo-chain start supports a subset of the arguments supported by snarkOS start. Here is a comparison of the arguments common to both:

    ArgumentComparison
    --networkamareleo-chain defaults to testnet (1)
    devnet.sh+snarkOS defaults to testnet (1)
    snarkOS defaults to mainnet (0)
    --logfileamareleo-chain defaults to /tmp/amareleo-chain.log
    snarkOS defaults to /tmp/snakros.log
    --storageamareleo-chain state storage differs from snarkOS depending on the flag --keep-state
    --rest
    --rest-rps
    --verbosity
    --metrics
    --metrics-ip    		identical

  • amareleo-chain does not support the developer and account commands provided by snarkOS. If needed, snarkOS can be used alongside amareleo-chain for these commands.

  • amareleo-chain start supports a new argument, a flag named --keep-state. When specified, the chain state is retained across runs. If not specified, the chain starts from genesis and is discarded on exit. The following table describes storage based on --keep-state. We can think of snarkOS as being equivalent to having --keep-state set (even though snarkOS does not support this flag).

    --keep-stateamareleo-chainsnarkOS
    set.amareleo-ledger-*/
    .amareleo-proposal-cache*    		.ledger-*/
    .current-proposal-cache*
    not set.amareleo-tmp-ledger-*/--

    Note: Even though a temporary ledger is persisted to disk when --keep-state is not specified, this data is temporary and is not guaranteed to be valid once the chain is terminated.