Pegasus 🐴🪶

Fast, one-click, seeded devnet for Cardano

Pegasus is a thin wrapper around a cardano-node to get Cardano developers off the ground in a single command:

pegasus

TODO: insert gif here

Why pegasus

Pegasus, the flying horse from greek mythology should get you off the ground quickly .. literally.

When developing applications and tools for Cardano, the need for a fast and deterministic sandbox environment in which to experiment with transactions running on-chain validators or run fast integration tests for off- and on-chain code arises quickly.

The principles and goals of this project are:

• Fast startup & teardown (< 1 second)
• Single binary installation on all platforms (< 5 min setup)
• Usable from the terminal and any application framework (command line options + files as interfaces)

Use pegasus instead of

• cardano-node directly, when you don't want to bother with configuring and seeding a local node manually. Pegasus can also be used to scaffold a full cardano-node configuration and seeded network which can later be used by any compatible cardano-node.

• plutip: if you prefer downloading a single binary over using nix.

• yaci-devkit, when you need faster startup or not want docker containers but plain sub-processes.

Installation

Pre-built binaries are available for Linux x86_64 and MacOS arm64:

curl TODO | unzip 
./pegasus --help

Configuration

By default, pegasus starts a block-producing cardano-node in a temporary directory.

Credits

Inspired by anvil of the Foundry development kit (TODO add link), this was created from glue code previously built for hydra, which now uses pegasus to setup devnets for end-to-end testing.

Contributing

Building

To build and run using nix:

nix run

Or install GHC and cabal (e.g. using GHCup) and:

cabal run

How it works

• Similar like other devnet tools, pegasus sets up a local cluster of cardano-nodes
• A key difference is, that it comes with a cardano-node binary embedded
• Both pegasus and the included cardano-node are statically linked and have no or minimal dependencies
  • TBD: avoid cardano-api et al?

TODO

Basics

• Embed cardano-node at build time mechanism
• Embed config and start a devnet
• Generate and seed keys

Distribution

• Redistributable executable (static libs)
• Pre-built binaries and "curl install"
• Reduce size of binaries
• Full static exeutable (?)
• Fill TODOs in readme

Configurability

• Configurable block time --block-time 0.1
• Use provided cardano-node --use-cardano-node <path-to-exe>
• Configurable era, e.g. --babbage
• Use and keep state directory when asked with --directory <dir>