Engineering Update - Week 1, Feb 2016

Community News
#1

Hi everyone,

We thought it’d be a good idea to start giving engineering updates, every week. Any member of the community is welcome to post about any work they did on one of the Blockstack libraries/repos. Or even point out and discuss pull requests that you feel are important for a wider discussion.

Server v.0.10.1: This week we released our Server v.0.10.1 and made it available on PyPi. We also posted some notes on the checks that a new release must pass before it can be used. The most important check is that a new release must boot from the virtual-genesis block (the block that is considered the first block in virtualchain) and then reach the same consensus hash as nodes on the last stable version.

Check out the new version by installing it via pip

pip install blockstack

A big shout out to Jude Nelson for all his work that made it into this release.

CLI v.0.12.1: We also released the new cli. The above pip command will also install it. Here is what the new interface looks like:

Blockstack cli version 0.0.12.3

positional arguments:
  {advanced,consensus,cost,lookup,ping,register,server,status,transfer,update,wallet}
    advanced            check advanced mode | turn --mode=off or --mode=on
    consensus           <block number> | get consensus hash at given block
    cost                <name> | get the cost of a name
    lookup              <name> | get data record for a particular name
    ping                check if the blockstack server is up
    register            <name> <data> | register a name
    server              display server:port | change by --server=x --port=y
    status              get basic information from the blockstack server
    transfer            <name> <address> | transfer a name you own
    update              <name> <data> | update a name record
    wallet              display wallet information

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

And you can use the new ‘status’ command to check which server are you talking to, what version of Blockstore is that server running, along with other information:

muneeb@amsterdam:bin$ blockstack status
{
    "cli_version": "0.0.12.1",
    "consensus_hash": "80258d19551e75010a0c0ac6982ffe6e",
    "last_block_processed": 396701,
    "last_block_seen": 396708,
    "server": "server.blockstack.org:6264",
    "server_version": "0.0.10.1"
}

We’d love to get more feedback from the community on the new CLI interface.

There have been a bunch of other really exciting things going on as well, but I’ll keep this update brief and cover them next time.

Cheers,

– Muneeb

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