Octant

Octant is a community-driven platform for experiments in decentralized governance.

Developed by the Golem Foundation to test various hypotheses around user control, voter engagement, and community funding, the platform allows for running various governance experiments in a real-life environment and rewards user participation with ETH.

Documentation is available here.

Architecture Overview

The backend is built using FastAPI with the following key components:

• FastAPI Application: Main application handling HTTP and WebSocket requests
• SocketIO: Real-time communication support with optional Redis backend
• SQLAlchemy: Database operations and models
• APScheduler: Background task processing (used practially only on non-production environments to automate the epoch transitions)

The application has been fully migrated from Flask to FastAPI. The old Flask implementation is kept under the /flask endpoint as a safety measure for the next allocation window, but all new development is done in FastAPI.

Key Features

• Async/await patterns throughout the codebase
• WebSocket support for real-time updates
• Background task processing
• Comprehensive testing suite
• Redis-based SocketIO manager (optional)

Development Setup

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8+
• Docker and Docker Compose
• Node.js and Yarn
• gcloud CLI (for Docker image authentication)

Initial Setup

1. Build the anvil container (requires gcloud authentication or local build):

yarn localenv:build-anvil

2. Build the development images:

yarn localenv:build-images

3. Start the development environment:

yarn localenv:up

4. Stop the environment:

yarn localenv:down

The local environment will be available at:

• http://octant.localhost:8080
• http://localhost:8080

Host Configuration

Add the following to your hosts file (/etc/hosts or C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts):

127.0.0.1 octant.localhost
127.0.0.1 rpc.octant.localhost
127.0.0.1 graph.octant.localhost
127.0.0.1 backend.octant.localhost
127.0.0.1 client.octant.localhost

Web Client Setup

1. Navigate to the client directory:

cd client

2. Copy the environment template:

cp .env.localenv-template .env

3. Start the development server:

yarn dev

The client will be available at http://octant.localhost:5173

Testing

The project includes comprehensive test coverage:

• Unit tests in /tests/v2
• E2E API tests in /tests/api_e2e
• Test utilities and factories

Run tests using:

pytest

Docker Image Authentication

gcloud Authentication

Configure Docker to use gcloud authentication:

gcloud auth configure-docker europe-docker.pkg.dev

Local Anvil Build

If you don't have access to the Golem Foundation image repository, build the anvil image locally:

git clone https://github.com/golemfoundation/foundry.git --branch=foundry-4129/trace-filter-support --single-branch
cd foundry
docker build -t europe-docker.pkg.dev/wildland-dev/octant-test/foundry:latest .

Contributor Agreement

In order to be able to contribute to any Wildland repository, you will need to agree to the terms of the Wildland Contributor Agreement. By contributing to any such repository, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the GPLv3 License.