[Improvement] Support downloading binary for native provider

[crystalin]

I was looking at replacing our polkadot-launch based process by zombienet but one important feature that is missing is the possibility to retrieve the binaries to run it in native:

We offer 2 solutions for this, which I think could be supported by zombienet:

• User can specify a "official" binary version that is retrieved from github automatically
• User can specify a docker image/path (like it is the case in the toml file at the moment) and zombienet will extract the binary locally

What is your opinion on those ?

[pepoviola]

Hi @crystalin, I think the more clean approach is to wrap zombienet using another script that downloads the needed binaries. For example, you can check this bash script used to download polkadot and run zombienet.

https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-stps/blob/main/zombienet.sh

Thanks!

[crystalin]

@pepoviola Thank you. It is the approach we are using for our current process, however it makes zombienet dependant.
If we were to imagine that each parachain is offering their yml config, as a kind of big repository for users to tests parachains (or for devs to test cross chains), each chain would have to come with a script instead of having a support directly in zombienet.

(PS: the link you shared is private and inaccessible)

[pepoviola]

@crystalin, sorry about the link. But back to the original question you are thinking on something like

[[parachains]]
id = 100

  [parachains.collator]
  name = "collator01"
  command = "http://github.com/some-project/releases/adder-collator"

So, zombienet can detect the url in the command and download the binary to run the collator?

Thanks!

[crystalin]

@pepoviola Yes, I think either using the command with url or a different property like image = "{{ZOMBIENET_COL_IMAGE}}" it would be binary = "http://github.com/some-project/releases/adder-collator"

[crystalin]

The other option we provide in our launch, is that the binary is extracted from the docker image that is provided

[pepoviola]

Hi @crystalin, #312 is a first step in this direction to improve the DX. We will explore the idea of create a registry in the upcoming weeks.

Thanks!

cc @wirednkod

[wirednkod]

We are now offering the setup command as can be seen in this doc page. Using that command binaries can be downloaded for MacOS or Linux. There are still some pending tasks that are in blocking state, such as downloading the polkadot image for MacOS, but these are tracked and will be implemented once unblocked.

Closing this issue