1. Summary
When you’re using Liblpanet and related projects like Nine Chronicles, you have to create, verify, and manage many things related to blockchain.
Since the internal implementation of blockchain is complicated to handle manually, Libplanet provides nesscary tools to help your work.
I hope you get inner peace and understanding with this article.
2. planet : Libplanet tool
The tool is called planet, which is a pretty intuitive name to catch.
This tool provides multiple utility functionalities for inspecting and working with Libplanet-based blockchain.
2.1. Installation
planet can be installed in two ways. For most cases, we recommend installing with npm.
$ npm install -g @planetarium/cli
If you prefer to use yarn, use this command:
yarn global add @planetarium/cli
planet also can be installed as .NET Core tool if you have .NET Core SDK in your system. Note that this will build planet from the source and may take a while to complete.
dotnet tool install -g Libplanet.Tools
Check your installation with this command:
planet --version
2.2. Update
planet version is updated when Libplanet is updated.
Please keep planet version to use planet with the latest version of Libplanet.
3. What’s inside planet
In this chapter, we’ll cover subcommands in planet.
3.1. apv
App Protocol Version(APV) is a protocol version, as the name implies. It is primarily used for updating Libplanet-based applications to the latest version. If you want to know more about the APV itself, please refer to Explain App Protocol Version(a.k.a. APV) topic.
You can sign, verify, and analyze APV with this command. The APV string is required to run the node, as the APV is used to determine if the other node is using compatible software with another. For Nine Chronicles, Planetarium signs and deploys a new APV, and the launcher updates it, so you can play the game without checking for updates manually.
You can see the real-world example in Create, Analyze APV with the planet command topic.
3.2. key
Key means public-private key pairs for Libplanet-based blockchain. You can think of them as a cryptographic account for Nine Chronicles.
In most cases, you don’t need to use this tool to manage keys, but in some cases, like running a local node or your own local blockchain, this tool will come in handy.
Here are the details of planet key command in Manage your keys with the ‘planet’ command topic.
3.3. mpt
MPT, Merkle Patricia Trie is a kind of tree of transactions’ hashes. We’ll not cover technical details of hash and tree.
With this command, you can easily handle the merkle trees inside Libplanet blockchain. In most cases, you should know root hash to handle certain trie.
3.4. store
This command is related to block storage itself. You can explore blocks and transactions with hash.
3.5. stats
This command shows you the summary of the provided blockchain in a CSV format.
4. Conclusion
With this article, you can now handle APV, Key, Merkle tree, block and transactions using planet cli tool. This tool will easily start your own node or blockchain and explore to get the information that you want to get.
Want to enhance planet cli tool?
Please visit our Discord and/or read CONTRIBUTING.md for getting started.