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Dev mode

The Open Autonomy framework comes with developer mode (dev mode) tooling to enable faster service developing and debugging. The dev mode supports running agent services with a number of functionalities enabled:

  • Hot reload, which enables hot code swapping and reflects changes on the agent code as well as on the local open-aea repository without rebuilding or restarting the containers manually.
  • Hardhat Instance, which enables the inclusion of a pre-configured Hardhat Instance image in the deployment, which can be used as a test blockchain.
  • ACN Instance, which enables inclusion of a pre-configured ACN Instance image, which can be used to test various agent communication functionalities, for example establishing the Tendermint network at the startup.
  • Execution replay of a previous agent in the service.
  • Benchmark the performance of an agent service.

Before starting this guide, ensure that your machine satisfies the framework requirements and that you have followed the set up guide. As a result you should have a Pipenv workspace folder.

Build and run an agent service in dev mode

  1. Fetch the service. Fetch the Price Oracle service from the remote registry.

    autonomy fetch valory/oracle_hardhat:0.1.0:<hash> --service

  2. Build the deployment. Within the service folder, execute the command below to build the service deployment in dev mode, including a pre-configured Hardhat instance.

    autonomy deploy build --dev --packages-dir ~/service/packages --open-aea-dir ~/git/open-aea/ --use-hardhat -ltm

    This will create a deployment environment in dev mode within the ./abci_build_* folder.

    You must modify the paths in the command above appropriately, pointing to:

    • the path to the local registry (/packages directory),
    • the path to the local Open AEA repository.

    If you don't want to specify the open-aea repository manually, you can install the open-aea in editable mode using

    pip3 install -e PATH_TO_OPEN_AEA_REPOSITORY

    Same thing goes for packages, if you're already in the packages/ directory (eg. running the command from packages/author/services/service) you don't have to specify the value for --packages-dir flag explicitly.

    Note: When building development deployments you don't have to define keys manually, autonomy generates the keys automatically in development mode. You can still specify the keys file if you already have one and you're planning on using it.

  3. Run the service. Navigate to the deployment environment folder (./abci_build_*) and run the deployment locally.

    cd abci_build_*
autonomy deploy run

    You can cancel the local execution at any time by pressing Ctrl+C.

Hot reload

Once the agents are running, you can make changes to the agent's code as well as the local Open AEA repository, and it will trigger the service restart.

The trigger is caused by any Python file closing in either the service/packages or the open-aea/ directory. So even if you haven't made any change and still want to restart the service, just open any Python file press Ctrl+S or save it from the file menu and it will trigger the restart.

Hardhat instance

By default the command that builds the service deployment (autonomy deploy build) only includes the agent nodes and the Tendermint nodes. If you want to include a local Hardhat node as a test blockchain for the ledger connection, you can do so by using the --use-hardhat flag in that command.

The deployment setup will include a Hardhat node (image valory/open-autonomy-hardhat) using hardhat as container name. Therefore, in order to use this node, you must set a service-level override so that the valory/ledger connection address is set to http://hardhat:8545. You can achieve this by editing the service configuration file service.yaml as follows:

service.yaml
# (...)
---
public_id: valory/ledger:0.1.0
type: connection
config:
  ledger_apis:
    ethereum:
      address: ${LEDGER_RPC:str:http://hardhat:8545}

Alternatively, you can leave the default service.yaml and export an environment variable:

service.yaml
# (...)
---
public_id: valory/ledger:0.1.0
type: connection
config:
  ledger_apis:
    ethereum:
      address: ${LEDGER_RPC:str:http://localhost:8545}

export LEDGER_RPC = http://hardhat:8545

If you require specific custom contracts to test your service, read the guide to include custom contracts.

ACN instance

You can also include an ACN node for agent communication using the --use-acn flag in autonomy deploy build.

The deployment setup will include an ACN node (image valory/open-acn-node) using acn as container name. Similarly as above, in order to use this node you must set a service-level override so that the valory/p2p_libp2p_client connection parameters are set to the appropriate values. You can achieve this by editing the service configuration file service.yaml as follows:

service.yaml
# (...)
---
public_id: valory/p2p_libp2p_client:0.1.0
type: connection
config:
  nodes:
  - uri: acn:11000
    public_key: 03c74dbfbe7bbc1b42429f78778017a3cd7eaf9d59d1634c9505a3f7c1a9350e71
cert_requests:
- identifier: acn
  ledger_id: ethereum
  message_format: '{public_key}'
  not_after: '2025-01-01'
  not_before: '2024-01-01'
  public_key: 03c74dbfbe7bbc1b42429f78778017a3cd7eaf9d59d1634c9505a3f7c1a9350e71
  save_path: .certs/acn_cosmos_11000.txt
is_abstract: false