Etherchain Light

Lightweight blockchain explorer for your private Ethereum chain

Etherchain Light is an Ethereum blockchain explorer built with NodeJS, Express and Parity. It does not require an external database and retrieves all information on the fly from a backend Ethereum node.

While there are several excellent Ethereum blockchain explorers available (etherscan, ether.camp and etherchain) they operate on a fixed subset of Ethereum networks, usually the mainnet and testnet. Currently there are no network agnostic blockchain explorers available. If you want to develop Dapps on a private testnet or would like to launch a private / consortium network, Etherchain Light will allow you to quickly explore such chains.

A demo instance connected to the EtherSocialNetwork is available at http://explorer.ethersocial.info/.

Current Features

• Browse blocks, transactions, accounts and contracts
• View pending transactions
• Display contract internal calls (call, create, suicide)
• Upload & verify contract sources
• Show Solidity function calls & parameters (for contracts with available source code)
• Display the current state of verified contracts
• Named accounts
• Advanced transaction tracing (VM Traces & State Diff)
• View failed transactions
• Live Backend Node status display
• Submit signed Transactions to the Network
• Support for all Bootswatch skins
• Accounts enumeration
• Signature verification
• Supports IPC and HTTP backend connections
• Responsive layout
• ERC20 Token support
• API service

Planned features

• Responsive web page

Missing a feature? Please request it by creating a new Issue.

Usage notes

This blockchain explorer is intended for private Ethereum chains. As it does not have a dedicated database all data will be retrived on demand from a backend Parity node. Some of those calls are ressource intensive (e.g. retrieval of the full tx list of an account) and do not scale well for acounts with a huge number of transactions. We currently develop the explorer using the Kovan testnet but it will work with every Parity compatible Ethereum network configuration. The explorer is still under heavy development, if you find any problems please create an issue or prepare a pull request.

Getting started

Setup from source

Supported OS: Ubuntu 16.04

Supported Ethereum backend nodes: Parity (Geth is currently not supported as it does not allow account list and received/sent tx enumeration)

1. Setup a nodejs & npm environment

   sudo apt-get install -y build-essential
   wget -qO- https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash -
   sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
   

2. Install the latest version of the Parity Ethereum client

   git clone https://github.com/ComBba/parity-ethereum.git
   git checkout v1.11.11
   cd parity-ethereum
   

3. Start parity using the following options for https://github.com/ComBba/parity-ethereum

   ./target/release/parity --config=config.toml
   

4. Clone this repository to your local machine:

   git clone https://github.com/EthersocialNetwork/etherchain-light --recursive` (Make sure to include `--recursive` in order to fetch the solc-bin git submodule)
   

5. Install all dependencies: npm install
6. Edit config/config.js and adjust the file to your local environment
7. Install 'Redis'

   cd ~
   wget http://download.redis.io/releases/redis-4.0.11.tar.gz
   tar xzf redis-4.0.11.tar.gz
   cd redis-4.0.11
   make
   ./src/redis-server
   

8. Start the explorer: npm start
9. Browse to http://localhost:3000

How to use "Forever": forever start ./bin/www

crontab -e for geoIP update

* * */5 * * node ~/esn_service/etherchain-light/node_modules/geoip-lite/scripts/updatedb.js