Lisk SDK

Disclaimer - Mostly Harmless

Please read our disclaimer carefully. With this repository we have opened access to the alpha release of the Lisk SDK. We have released the Lisk SDK in its current form in order for us to improve the development experience through community feedback and contributions.

We strictly discourage anyone from using the alpha release of the Lisk SDK for any production-based blockchain applications, i.e. a blockchain operating on a real mainnet. Over the course of the alpha phase there will be significant changes in the Lisk protocol and implementation, which will eventually bring the accessibility and reliability to a level which is feasible for production-based blockchain applications. At this time we only recommend the Lisk SDK for proof-of-concept blockchain applications, i.e. a blockchain operating on a fake testnet.

The only application built using the Lisk SDK currently feasible for production usage is Lisk Core, the client of the Lisk network itself.

Please be advised we cannot guarantee blockchains created with the alpha release of the Lisk SDK will remain compatible with our planned (beta/rc) releases.

We hope you enjoy building your proof-of-concept blockchain applications using the Lisk SDK, and shall look forward to receiving your feedback and contributions during the alpha phase.

What is the Lisk SDK

The Lisk SDK aims to provide an easy and reliable software development kit for building blockchain applications which are compatible with the Lisk Protocol. The architecture of the Lisk SDK has been designed so that it can be extended to meet the requirements of a wide variety of blockchain application use-cases. The codebase is written entirely in JavaScript, which means for a majority of developers, no significant change of tools or mindset is required to get started. The Lisk SDK makes every effort to allow developers to focus simply and purely on writing the code that matters to their own blockchain application, and nothing more.

Architecture Overview

The Lisk SDK operates on the NodeJS runtime and consists primarily of an application framework (Lisk Framework), a collection of libraries providing blockchain application functionalities (Lisk Elements), and a powerful command-line tool (Lisk Commander) allowing developers to manage a Lisk node instance and interact with a Lisk compatible network. The diagram below provides a high-level overview of the architecture:

Package Directories

Directory	Description
Framework	An application framework responsible for establishing and maintaining the interactions between the modules of a Lisk blockchain application.
Elements	A collection of libraries, each of them implementing some form of blockchain application functionality such as cryptography, transactions, p2p, etc.
Commander	A command line tool allowing developers to manage a Lisk node instance and interact with a Lisk compatible network.

Installation

Dependencies

The following dependencies need to be installed in order to run applications created with the Lisk SDK:

Dependencies	Version
NodeJS	10.14.3
PostgreSQL	10+
Redis (optional)	5+

You can find further details on installing these dependencies in our pre-installation setup guide.

Installation of Lisk Framework

To start using the Lisk SDK you need to install one npm package - lisk-framework:

npm install lisk-framework@alpha

Usage

To start, create the project structure of your blockchain application. There are no special requirements here, you can create the basic Node.js project folder structure with npm init.

To create a blockchain application, you need to provide an entry point of your application (like index.js) and set-up your network by using the modules of Lisk SDK.

It is quite simple to have a working blockchain application, mirroring the configuration of the existing Lisk network. This can be done by copying the following three lines of code to your index.js:

const { Application, genesisBlockDevnet } = require('lisk-framework');

const app = new Application('my-app', genesisBlockDevnet);

app
	.run()
	.then(() => app.logger.info('App started...'))
	.catch(error => {
		console.error('Faced error in application', error);
		process.exit(1);
	});

After that you can start the application by:

node index.js

More usage examples and configuration samples will be made available during the alpha phase on the official Lisk documentation portal.

Get Involved

Reason	How
Want to chat with our community	Chat with them on Lisk.chat
Want to chat with our developers	Chat with them on Gitter
Found a bug	Open a new issue
Found a security issue	See our bounty program
Want to share your research	Propose your research
Want to develop with us	Create a fork

Contributors

https://github.com/LiskHQ/lisk-sdk/graphs/contributors

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

This program also incorporates work previously released with lisk 0.9.11 (and earlier) versions under the MIT License. To comply with the requirements of that license, the following permission notice, applicable to those parts of the code only, is included below:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

preetidangi21/lisk-sdk