Moonbeam Testnet

Starting with FireFly v1.1, it's easy to connect to public Ethereum chains. This guide will walk you through the steps to create a local FireFly development environment and connect it to the public Moonbeam Alpha testnet.

Previous steps: Install the FireFly CLI

If you haven't set up the FireFly CLI already, please go back to the Getting Started guide and read the section on how to Install the FireFly CLI.

← ① Install the FireFly CLI

Create an evmconnect.yml config file

In order to connect to the Moonbeam testnet, you will need to set a few configuration options for the evmconnect blockchain connector. Create a text file called evmconnect.yml with the following contents:

confirmations:
  required: 4 # choose the number of confirmations you require
policyengine.simple:
  fixedGasPrice: null
  gasOracle:
    mode: connector

For more info about confirmations, see Public vs. Permissioned

For this tutorial, we will assume this file is saved at ~/Desktop/evmconnect.yml. If your path is different, you will need to adjust the path in the next command below.

Creating a new stack

To create a local FireFly development stack and connect it to the Moonbeam Alpha testnet, we will use command line flags to customize the following settings:

• Create a new Ethereum based stack named moonbeam with 1 member
• Disable multiparty mode. We are going to be using this FireFly node as a Web3 gateway, and we don't need to communicate with a consortium here
• Use an remote RPC node. This will create a signer locally, so that our signing key never leaves the development machine.
• See the moonbeam docs and select an HTTPS RPC endpoint
• Set the chain ID to 1287 (the correct ID for the Moonbeam Alpha testnet)
• Merge the custom config created above with the generated evmconnect config file

To do this, run the following command:

ff init ethereum moonbeam 1 \
    --multiparty=false \
    -n remote-rpc \
    --remote-node-url <selected RPC endpoint> \
    --chain-id 1287 \
    --connector-config ~/Desktop/evmconnect.yml

Start the stack

Now you should be able to start your stack by running:

ff start moonbeam

After some time it should print out the following:

Web UI for member '0': http://127.0.0.1:5000/ui
Sandbox UI for member '0': http://127.0.0.1:5109


To see logs for your stack run:

ff logs moonbeam

Get some DEV

At this point you should have a working FireFly stack, talking to a public chain. However, you won't be able to run any transactions just yet, because you don't have any way to pay for gas. A testnet faucet can give us some DEV, the native token for Moonbeam.

First, you will need to know what signing address your FireFly node is using. To check that, you can run:

ff accounts list moonbeam
[
  {
    "address": "0x02d42c32a97c894486afbc7b717edff50c70b292",
    "privateKey": "..."
  }
]

Copy the address listed in the output from this command. Go to https://apps.moonbeam.network/moonbase-alpha/faucet/ and paste the address in the form. Click the Submit button.

Confirm the transaction on Moonscan

You should be able to go lookup your account on Moonscan for the Moonbase Alpha testnet and see that you now have a sufficient balance of DEV. Simply paste in your account address to search for it.

Use the public testnet

Now that you have everything set up, you can follow one of the other FireFly guides such as Using Tokens or Custom Smart Contracts. For detailed instructions on interacting with the Moonbeam Alpha testnet, please see the Moonbeam docs.