Forest is a Filecoin node written in Rust. With Forest, you can:

• Send and receive FIL (at your own risk - Forest is experimental),
• validate the Filecoin blockchain,
• generate blockchain snapshots.

While less feature-complete than the canonical Filecoin node, Lotus, Forest aims to be the faster and easier-to-use alternative.

Questions

Have questions? Feel free to post them in Forest Q&A!

Run with Docker

No need to install Rust toolchain or other dependencies, you will need only Docker - works on Linux, macOS and Windows.

# daemon
❯ docker run --init -it --rm ghcr.io/chainsafe/forest:latest --help
# cli
❯ docker run --init -it --rm --entrypoint forest-cli ghcr.io/chainsafe/forest:latest --help

Next, run a Forest node in a CLI window. E.g. Run calibration network

Thereafter, in another terminal, you will be able to use the forest-cli binary directly by launching bash in the forest container:

docker exec -it forest /bin/bash

For more in-depth usage and sample use cases, please refer to the Forest Docker documentation in the Forest Book. Keep in mind that the latest tag is the latest stable release. If you want to use the current development build, use the edge tag.

Dependencies

• Rust (toolchain version is specified in rust-toolchain.toml)
• Go for building F3 sidecar module. (toolchain version is specified in go.work)

Install rustup

Install Go

• OS Base-Devel/Build-Essential
• Clang compiler

Ubuntu (20.04)

sudo apt install build-essential clang

Archlinux

sudo pacman -S base-devel clang

Fedora (36)

sudo dnf install -y clang-devel

Alpine

apk add git curl make gcc clang clang-dev musl-dev

Installation

# Clone repository
git clone --recursive https://github.com/chainsafe/forest
cd forest

# Install binary to $HOME/.cargo/bin
make install

# Run the node on mainnet
forest

To create release binaries, checkout the latest tag and compile with the release feature.

git checkout $TAG
make build # make debug build of forest daemon and cli
# or
make release # make release build of forest daemon and cli
# or
make install # install forest daemon and cli

Config

Keystore

To encrypt the keystore while in headless mode, set the FOREST_KEYSTORE_PHRASE environmental variable. Otherwise, skip the encryption (not recommended in production environments) with --encrypt-keystore false.

Network

Run the node with custom config and bootnodes

forest --config /path/to/your_config.toml

Example of config options available:

[client]
data_dir = "<directory for all chain and networking data>"
genesis_file = "<relative file path of genesis car file>"

[network]
listening_multiaddrs = ["<multiaddress>"]
bootstrap_peers = ["<multiaddress>"]

Example of a multiaddress: "/ip4/54.186.82.90/tcp/1347/p2p/12D3K1oWKNF7vNFEhnvB45E9mw2B5z6t419W3ziZPLdUDVnLLKGs"

Configuration sources

Forest will look for config files in the following order and priority:

• Paths passed to the command line via the --config flag.
• The environment variable FOREST_CONFIG_PATH, if no config was passed through command line arguments.
• If none of the above are found, Forest will look in the systems default configuration directory ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME on Linux systems).
• After all locations are exhausted and a config file is not found, a default configuration is assumed and used.

Logging

The Forest logger uses Rust's log filtering options with the RUST_LOG environment variable. For example:

RUST_LOG="debug,forest_libp2p::service=info" forest

Will show all debug logs by default, but the forest_libp2p::service logs will be limited to info

Forest can also send telemetry to the endpoint of a Loki instance or a Loki agent (see Grafana Cloud). Use --loki to enable it and --loki-endpoint to specify the interface and the port.

Testing

First, install the nextest test runner.

cargo install cargo-nextest --locked

# To run base tests
cargo nextest run # use `make test-release` for longer compilation but faster execution

# To run all tests and all features enabled
make test-all

Chain synchronization checks are run after every merge to main. This code is maintained in a separate repository - Forest IaC.

Linters

The project uses exhaustively a set of linters to keep the codebase clean and secure in an automated fashion. While the CI will have them installed, if you want to run them yourself before submitting a PR (recommended), you should install a few of them.

# You can install those linters also with other package managers or by manually grabbing the binaries from the projects' repositories.

# Rust code linter
rustup component add clippy

# Rust code formatter
rustup component add rustfmt

# TOML linter
cargo install taplo-cli --locked

# Scanning dependencies for security vulnerabilities
cargo install cargo-audit

# Spellcheck
cargo install cargo-spellcheck

After everything is installed, you can run make lint-all.

Joining the testnet

Select the builtin calibnet configuration with the --chain option. The --auto-download-snapshot will ensure that a snapshot is downloaded if needed without any prompts.

./target/release/forest --chain calibnet --auto-download-snapshot

Interacting with Forest via CLI

When the Forest daemon is started, an admin token will be displayed (alternatively, use --save-token <token> flag to save it on disk). You will need this for commands that require a higher level of authorization (like a password). Forest, as mentioned above, uses multiaddresses for networking. This is no different in the CLI. To set the host and the port to use, if not using the default port or using a remote host, set the FULLNODE_API_INFO environment variable. This is also where you can set a token for authentication.

FULLNODE_API_INFO="<token goes here>:/ip4/<host>/tcp/<port>/http

Note that if a token is not present in the FULLNODE_API_INFO env variable, the colon is removed.

Forest developers will prepend this variable to CLI commands over using export on Linux or its equivalent on Windows. This will look like the following:

FULLNODE_API_INFO="..." forest-cli auth api-info -p admin

The admin token can also be set using --token flag.

forest-cli --token <ADMIN_TOKEN>

Forest executable organization

The binaries in the Forest repository are organized into the following categories:

Binary	Role	Command example
forest	Forest daemon, used to connect to the Filecoin network	forest --chain calibnet --encrypt-keystore false
forest-cli	Human-friendly wrappers around the Filecoin JSON-RPC API	forest-cli info show
forest-tool	Handle tasks not involving the Forest daemon	forest-tool snapshot fetch

Detaching Forest process

You can detach Forest process via the --detach flag so that it runs in the background:

./target/release/forest --detach

The command will block until the detached Forest process has started its RPC server, allowing you to chain some RPC command immediately after.

Forest snapshot links

• calibration network
• main network

Documentation

• Forest Book

Contributing

• Check out our contribution guidelines: CONTRIBUTING.md

ChainSafe Security Policy

Reporting a Security Bug

We take all security issues seriously, if you believe you have found a security issue within a ChainSafe project please notify us immediately. If an issue is confirmed, we will take all necessary precautions to ensure a statement and patch release is made in a timely manner.

Please email a description of the flaw and any related information (e.g. reproduction steps, version) to security at chainsafe dot io.

License

Forest is dual licensed under MIT + Apache 2.0.