An automated governance helper for Dash Masternodes.
Note: Sentinel was deprecated by Dash Core 20.0 which migrated all functionality directly into Dash Core.
Sentinel is an autonomous agent for persisting, processing and automating Dash governance objects and tasks. It is a Python application which runs alongside the DashCore instance on each Dash Masternode.
These instructions cover installing Sentinel on Ubuntu 18.04 / 20.04.
Update system package list and install dependencies:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get -y install git python3 virtualenv
Make sure Python version 3.6.x or above is installed:
python3 --version
Make sure the local DashCore daemon running is at least version 0.15.0.
$ dashd --version | head -n1
Clone the Sentinel repo and install Python dependencies.
$ git clone https://github.com/dashpay/sentinel.git && cd sentinel
$ virtualenv -p $(which python3) ./venv
$ ./venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
Sentinel is "used" as a script called from cron every minute.
Set up a crontab entry to call Sentinel every minute:
$ crontab -e
In the crontab editor, add the lines below, replacing '/path/to/sentinel' to the path where you cloned sentinel to:
* * * * * cd /path/to/sentinel && ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.py >/dev/null 2>&1
Test the config by running tests:
$ ./venv/bin/py.test ./test
With all tests passing and crontab setup, Sentinel will stay in sync with dashd and the installation is complete
Configuration is done via environment variables. Example:
$ RPCUSER=dash RPCPASSWORD=password RPCHOST=127.0.0.1 RPCPORT=19998 ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.py
A path to a dash.conf
file can be specified in sentinel.conf
:
# warning: deprecated
dash_conf=/path/to/dash.conf
This is now deprecated and will be removed in a future version. Users are encouraged to update their configurations to use environment variables instead.
To view debug output, set the SENTINEL_DEBUG
environment variable to anything non-zero, then run the script manually:
$ SENTINEL_DEBUG=1 ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.py
Please follow the DashCore guidelines for contributing.
Specifically:
-
To contribute a patch, the workflow is as follows:
- Fork repository
- Create topic branch
- Commit patches
In general commits should be atomic and diffs should be easy to read. For this reason do not mix any formatting fixes or code moves with actual code changes.
Commit messages should be verbose by default, consisting of a short subject line (50 chars max), a blank line and detailed explanatory text as separate paragraph(s); unless the title alone is self-explanatory (like "Corrected typo in main.cpp") then a single title line is sufficient. Commit messages should be helpful to people reading your code in the future, so explain the reasoning for your decisions. Further explanation here.
Please use black
to format code automatically before opening a PR:
./venv/bin/black .
Released under the MIT license, under the same terms as DashCore itself. See LICENSE for more info.