Alan Szepieniec 86698687a8 feat: Add Announcement viewer

Every transaction can have zero or more announcements, which are essentially
messages that must be included across all future mergers and updates.
Announcements are typically used for transmitting information related to
receiving UTXOs, encrypted. However, a new use case is that of *transparent
transaction info*, which is an announcement containing the UTXOs and the
commitment randomnesses needed to reproduce the transaction's inputs and
outputs. With such a transparent transaction info announcement, third parties
can transparently audit transactions.

This commit adds a page for viewing announcements, and if the announcement can
be parsed as a transparent transaction info type announcement then it is
rendered as such, complete with native currency amounts and linkable UTXOs
(where possible).

The path for accessing announcements is any of
 - `/announcement/digest/<hex-string>/<index>`
 - `/announcement/tip/<index>`
 - `/announcement/genesis/<index>`
 - `/announcement/height/<height>/<index>`
 - `/announcement/height_or_digest/<height-or-diges>/index/<index>`.
The last bullet point exists to support the quick lookup functionality, which is
also new. A `AnnouncementSelector` has display and from-string methods relating
these path formats to the relevant object. A suite of (prop)tests verifies
parsing.

Also, this commit enables mocking, which is useful when the neptune-core node
the explorer is connected to is outdated, unsynced, or for whatever reason does
not serve the desired data. The RPC client call is intercepted, and if it fails
and mocking is enabled, an imagined (pseudorandom) resource of the requested
type is returned. To enable mocking, compile with the "mock" feature flag and
set the "MOCK" environment variable.

2025-08-22 16:38:30 +02:00

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neptune-explorer

A web-based block explorer for the Neptune Cash blockchain. neptune-explorer provides a basic HTML view and a REST RPC API.

As of 2024-05-22 this code is running at https://explorer.neptune.cash.

Some design notes are available.

Installing

Compile from Source -- Linux Debian/Ubuntu

You may need to:

sudo apt install pkg-config libssl-dev

Then

git clone https://github.com/Neptune-Crypto/neptune-explorer.git
cd neptune-explorer
cargo install --locked --path .

Windows, Mac

not tested or supported. Please let us know if you get it work. patches accepted.

Running

install neptune-core and start it, or otherwise find a running neptune-core instance.
start neptune-explorer

nohup neptune-explorer 2>&1 > /path/to/logs/neptune-explorer.log &

Notes:

The block-explorer automatically uses the same network (mainnet, testnet, etc) as the neptune-core instance it is connected to, and the network is displayed in the web interface.
If neptune-core RPC server is running on a non-standard port, you can provide it with the --neptune-rpc-port flag.
neptune-explorer listens for http requests on port 3000 by default. This can be changed with the --listen-port flag.
Site name must be specified with the --site-name flag.

Connecting via Browser

Just navigate to http://localhost:3000/

Mocking

When connected to an out-of-date or unsynced neptune-core node, it might be a good idea to turn on mocking so that whenever a resource is unavailable, a random one is generated and returned. To do this, compile with the feature flag "mock" and make sure that the "MOCK" environment variable is set.

In one command: MOCK=1 cargo run --features "mock" -- --site-name testname

SSL/TLS, Nginx, etc.

If hosting for public use, it is suggested to use nginx or similar in reverse-proxy mode to connect to http://localhost:3000. Nginx can then handle SSL/TLS certs and connections, as neptune-explorer has no built-in support for that.

Logging

All logging is output to standard out.

The log level can be set through the environment variable RUST_LOG. Valid values are: trace, debug, info, warn, and error. The default value is info. E.g.: RUST_LOG=trace cargo run.

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