Install Hyperledger Fabric and Convector on Fedora

For some reason, I decided to try out Fedora. I quite like their policy of keeping most of their packages updated and hence, took an active decision to give it a try.

This article hopefully would become a part of a very long series of articles on writing chaincode for Hyperledger Fabric Distributed Ledger system.

Why Convector?

I personally like Convector because the Convector code looks far more cleaner , far more readable and far easier to understand than the complicated code that is traditionally written for Hyperledger Fabric. Fabric’s code style looks like it needs 100 comments while Convector code is easier to read and fairly self describing while doing the same thing.

TypeScript

While you can use TypeScript with regular chaincode as well, Convector uses TypeScript features making Convector code look like the TypeScript we all have came to enjoy reading and writing. If your team works with C# or Java and not just TypeScript, I bet your team would have an easier time moving to Convector due to the code cleanliness that using TypeScript can promote.

Sample code

As a programmer, I value readability very highly. Ease of readability always leads to ease of maintenance and I think everyone likes easy to maintain and easy to read code. As is obvious from this code.

Update your system

No article on Linux would be complete without a simple request for you to update your OS packages. So why should this be any different?

sudo dnf update

Install Docker

Installation of Docker is a bit more interesting. While Convector is using Docker, I noticed Fedora is making a move towards Podman.

The steps are from Docker’s own website but for obvious reasons are subject to change, so do make a check from there in case something doesn’t work.

Adding Docker repository

For me, this was already installed. But this helps us add new repository.

sudo dnf -y install dnf-plugins-core

Let us now add the repository

sudo dnf config-manager \
    --add-repo \
    https://download.docker.com/linux/fedora/docker-ce.repo

Installing Docker Engine

sudo dnf install -y docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

Using Docker without sudo

sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $(whoami)
sudo setfacl --modify user:$USER:rw /var/run/docker.sock

Start Docker

sudo systemctl start docker

Add Docker Compose

sudo dnf install -y docker-compose

Install useful dependencies

sudo dnf install -y curl git golang python python2 gcc-c++

Install Node.JS 8.11.4

Yes we need an older version of Node.JS. It’s one of the many minor issues with Convector. Now for obvious reasons your other projects probably use newer versions of Node.JS. I know mine do.

So it would be nicer if we could maintain multiple Node.JS versions and we can use Node Version Manager to do this.

This will help us install Node v8.11.4

Node Version Manager

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.38.0/install.sh | bash
source ~/.bash_profile
nvm install 8.11.4

Install Hyperledger Fabric 1.4.0

Yes Convector works with Hyperledger 1.x currently only.

Let us install

curl -sSL https://goo.gl/6wtTN5 | sudo bash -s 1.4.0

Install Hurley

Hurley helps us create Convector projects.

npm i -g @worldsibu/hurley @worldsibu/convector-cli

Creating a Blockchain Network

Use Hurley to create a new blockchain network with 2 organizations, 2 users per organization, and 1 channel in your computer.

Credits

This small article is inspired by Covalent’s own article on Installation on Ubuntu. As you would notice, we have cut down quite a few advanced steps that not a lot of users might have shown interest in.