Cosmos-sdk: First Run Experience

[faddat]

Our user is a first time full node operator or validator.

At present, they've got to curl a genesis.json file and manually add seeds to config.toml.

It probably doesn't need to be that way. One option is the BitTorrent DHT.

Here's the open source movie sintel

08ada5a7a6183aae1e09d831df6748d566095a10

That hash above corresponds to a set of peers (seeds) and also to files (genesis.json).

I had difficulty setting up several cosmos-sdk chains today and the difficulty certainly came from this step.

So let's simplify:

desmos join 08ada5a7a6183aae1e09d831df6748d566095a10

Doesn't make you a validator, just gets you on that network by connecting you to some seeds/peers and getting you the genesis.json file.

I think this will help with onboarding, network health, and community building.

Thoughts?

[zmanian]

I think we really should do a better job for our first time node operators. Possible by pre-configuring a seed node and automatically fetching genesis.

[faddat]

Yeah my thinking is that it should be reduced to a single line.

Check this readme out:

https://GitHub.com/cosmos/gaia

.....

Joining the network should go like:

• compile/download binary
• Join

[marbar3778]

This needs some work from the Tendermint side. It overlaps with https://github.com/tendermint/tendermint/issues/4204

[faddat]

Wanted to check in and let y'all knnow I'm still on this thread.

What is a practical approach?

Start with Gaia and then make PRs to the sdk and tendermint?

Basically, I think that

gaia start

Should connect to the latest mainnet, and that we can provide guidance to downstream cosmos-sdk users so that all chains can benefit from this ease of use improvement.