Re: [ANN][DCR] Decred - Hybrid PoW/PoS | btcsuite Devs | Tons of New Features

This development dispatch covers work completed since the Decred v0.1.5 release from June 7th, 2016. Since then, developers have merged 16 pull requests of code into 3 software repositories (for changes, see below). v0.1.6 includes a new tool, dcrinstall, to automate the install, upgrade, and setup process for the Decred software.

dcrinstall: https://github.com/decred/decred-release/releases/tag/v0.1.6
Binaries: https://github.com/decred/decred-binaries/releases/tag/v0.1.6

dcrd

Fixed an issue with memory alignment on 32-bit architectures (269-2bbfd5f)
Fixed an issue that interferes with the new dcrinstall package when checking if .dcrd exists (270-fa72e21)
Added a simnet option to the config file (272-e6beeb6)
Updated versioning (271-9279321)

dcrwallet

Moved prompting of passphrases and seed to a prompt package so other tools can call the same prompts (268-b3bd20e)
Modified the wallet package to import the database driver directly (269-f2a12cf)
Added a non-internal prompt package (273-dfb6bcd)
Fixed a build error for the test harness (274-697443a)
Updated documentation (275-7bdd976) and versioning (271-1ca9472)

dcrticketbuyer

Updated the default directory to be OS-specific (10-4297aa0)
Updated configuration (13-01a9cd6), documentation (14-e5d08c1, 15-7c3b826), and versioning (12-3505d11)

Developer Notes
dcrinstall

dcrinstall is a tool to automate the install, upgrade, and setup process for the Decred software. In install mode dcrinstall downloads the latest released binaries of dcrd, dcrwallet, dcrctl, and dcrticketbuyer for your operating system and platform, installs them, sets up the config files, and creates a wallet for you. In upgrade mode, dcrinstall replaces your binaries with the latest copies but makes no changes to your configs.

Upgrading an existing installation

The following steps are required to upgrade a system with Decred that was not installed by dcrinstall. If you already have Decred installed you will need to follow these instructions the first time.

The dcrinstall tool expects the following directory layout. In order to upgrade you must copy your current configuration files into the correct location and ensure everything still works. You may also want to copy you executables to the directory dcrinstall expects as well.

If dcrinstall detects all configuration files it'll operate in upgrade mode. Upgrade mode only overwrites the binaries in %HOMEPATH%\decred (or ~/decred on a UNIX type OS). The dcrinstall tool records all actions in %HOMEPATH%\decred\dcrinstall.log (or ~/decred/dcrinstall.log on a UNIX type OS).

Windows configuration files:

Code:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Dcrctl\dcrctl.conf
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Dcrd\dcrd.conf
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Dcrticketbuyer\ticketbuyer.conf
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Dcrwallet\dcrwallet.conf

Binaries directory:

Code:

%HOMEPATH%\decred\

OSX configuration files:

Code:

~/Library/Application Support/Dcrctl/dcrctl.conf
~/Library/Application Support/Dcrd/dcrd.conf
~/Library/Application Support/Dcrticketbuyer/ticketbuyer.conf
~/Library/Application Support/Dcrwallet/dcrwallet.conf

Binaries directory:

Code:

~/decred

UNIX configuration files:

Code:

~/.dcrctl/dcrctl.conf
~/.dcrd/dcrd.conf
~/.dcrticketbuyer/ticketbuyer.conf
~/.dcrwallet/dcrwallet.conf

Binaries directory:

Code:

~/decred

Run the software

Now that you have the files where dcrinstall can find them you can download and run dcrinstall. For Windows open a cmd.exe window then:

Code:

cd %HOMEPATH%\Download
dcrinstall.exe

For OSX and UNIX you will also need to make the file executable before runnning it:

Code:

cd Downloads/
chmod u+x dcrinstall
./dcrinstall

and your installation will be upgraded to the latest released version.

Clean install

If you are doing a clean install (no existing Decred configuration files) you can just run dcrinstall and it will setup and configure all the binaries. For Windows open a cmd.exe window and:

Code:

cd %HOMEPATH%\Download
dcrinstall.exe

For OSX and UNIX:

Code:

cd Downloads/
./dcrinstall

You will be asked to provide a passphrase for you wallet and given the opportunity to use and existing wallet seed if you have one.

Log file

dcrinstall saves a log file with information on everything it did which you may examine if you need more information. On Windows the file is located at:

Code:

%HOMEPATH%\decred\dcrinstaller.log

On OSX and UNIX the file is located at:

Code:

~/decred/dcrinstaller.log

Running Decred programs

On Windows open cmd.exe

Code:

%HOMEPATH%\decred\dcrd.exe

One OSX and UNIX like systems:

Code:

cd decred/
./dcrd

Alternatively you can add the directory to your path. For Windows see http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000549.htm For OSX and UNIX refer to the documentation for your shell.

Public keys

The file cmd/dcrinstall/pubkey.go contains the decred public key which is used to check the signed manifest in the release. You can compare the contents of this file to what you get from a keyserver to confirm that dcrinstaller is using the proper key.

Important

dcrinstall can only install Decred releases v0.1.6 or later (although as described above it can be used to upgrade from an older version). dcrinstall has been tested on Windows 10, Windows 7, OSX 10.11, Bitrig current, OpenBSD, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Raspbian. Due to an issue with the go cross-compiler, binaries are not available for linux-arm64. Users running Linux on arm64 should either build from source or contact the Decred developers for a binary for that platform.