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Exposing APIs

Ethereum APIs​

There are a few main options for connecting to Ethereum nodes:

  • RPC (Remote Procedure Call) - The simplest option, just sends JSON RPC requests to a node. Used by web3.js and many other libs.
  • IPC (Inter-Process Communication) - Local socket connection, higher performance than RPC. Also used by web3.js and others.
  • WS (WebSockets) - For receiving real-time updates (new blocks, logs, etc). Also supported in web3.js.
  • ETH (Devp2p) - Low level protocol to connect to nodes. Quite complex, not commonly used outside of core Ethereum implementations.

So in code, it would look something like this:

// RPC
const Web3 = require('web3')
const web3 = new Web3('http://localhost:8545')

// IPC
const web3 = new Web3('/tmp/geth.ipc')

// WS
const web3WS = new Web3('ws://localhost:8546')

// ETH / Devp2p
// Much more complex, not shown here

You can then call methods on web3 to interact with the Ethereum blockchain, deploy contracts, send transactions, etc. So to connect to both a consensus node (for mining/block info) and an execution node (for deploying contracts), you'd simply instantiate multiple Web3 instances pointing to different nodes.

Exposing APIs using Sedge​

info

By default, Sedge doesn't expose any important port that can be used to interact with the node. This is to prevent accidental exposure of the node to the internet.

In order to connect to a node, you need to expose the ports of the nodes you are running that expose those APIs.

To expose the needed ports for APIs interactions in the generated docker-compose file, you will need to set the --map-all flag while generating those files. This will expose all the ports of the nodes that expose APIs.

sedge generate full-node --map-all
caution

Exposing the ports of your node to the internet is a security risk.

Only expose the ports you need, and make sure to secure them properly.

tip

If you run a docker image that use the same network of the setup, by default sedge-network, you can connect that container to the nodes you already have running. This way you can connect to the nodes without exposing the ports to the internet.