Using Helm Charts to set up the Epirus Chain Explorer and connect it to a running Quorum network.
Some weeks ago we published an article in which we refer to one of our GitHub projects that you can use to deploy a quorum network with a dynamic amount of nodes to your Kubernetes cluster. In this article, I will describe how to set up our newest addition to the Helm Chart — the Epirus block explorer.
Why we use Epirus
If you come across the task to choose a block explorer in 2021 you will most likely have 2–3 viable solutions of which some are licensed and some are free to use. Most Ethereum Clients will most likely favor BlockScout, an open-source block explorer with a wide variety of features. But, if it comes to quorum-based networks we discovered some quirks that do now align well with BlockScout. One example would be the BlockScout having problems parsing rafts block timestamp which is in nanoseconds instead of seconds. We discovered that those kinds of problems often arise with open-sourced explorers in combination with quorum-based networks. This could be due to the enterprise nature of quorum which ultimately could lead to fewer open-source contributions.
Based on those discoveries we decided to stick with the explorer that is covering most of quorums peculiarities and is also referred to in the official quorum documentation — Epirus.
How to deploy the Explorer
To deploy the Epirus Explorer to your cluster adjust the epirus values in the values.yaml file. Enable the ingress value to make it accessible locally or adjust the node value to change to which node Epirus will connect to.
quorum: version: 20.10.0 storageSize: 1Gi geth: networkId: 10 port: 30303 raftPort: 50401 verbosity: 3 gethParams: --permissioned \ --nodiscover \ --nat=none \ --unlock 0 \ --emitcheckpoints \ --rpccorsdomain '*' \ --rpcvhosts '*' \ epirus: enabled: true port: 3000 ingress: true node: quorum-node1
After adjusting these values simply run helm install — if you don’t have a running cluster — or helm upgrade if you already deployed a cluster on your machine to deploy/upgrade the charts.
helm install nnodes quorum -n quorum-network helm upgrade nnodes quorum -n quorum-network
Accessing the UI
After a successful deployment of the explorer, we can access the UI using the Cluster’s IP. Run the following command to get the IP and go to <cluster-ip>/dashboard.
kubectl cluster-info
If everything deployed and started successfully you should be welcomed by the Epirus Dashboard. Navigate to the different tabs on the left to get information on contracts, transactions, blocks, and the network itself.
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