Since the release of HORNET as beta about one month ago, we have received a lot of feedback. Most of all positive.
We are proud that the community is so well involved in the development of HORNET. By testing, but also by fixing bugs and adding features.
Special thanks go to the community members Dave [EF] for extensively testing HORNET on various operating systems and to Thoralf for fixing bugs.
Thank you! This is how a community project should work!
In the last month we have worked hard to improve HORNET and add new features. Some numbers:
- 270 commits
- 61 pull requests merged
- 27 issues closed
- 15 releases published
Some new features are:
- The Spammer Plugin: Automatically issue zero value transactions with HORNET
- The Monitor Plugin: With this plugin you have your own tanglemonitor.com
- The Graph Plugin: With this plugin you have your own tangle.glumb.de
- The MQTT Plugin: This plugin provides all topics known from ZMQ but uses MQTT
With the latest release (0.3.0) HORNET is now able to create local snapshots and it can prune its database. This was defined by milestone 4.
By doing local snapshots and pruning the database, it is now possible for devices with small storage capacities (i.e. Raspberry Pi), to participate in the network without having to delete their database manually.
This was a huge step. And it was the last missing piece to reach feature parity with IRI 1.8.0.
By reaching feature parity with IRI, you can now use HORNET as a replacement for IRI, however, please note that HORNET first has to pass some more code reviews, to be sure that everything works correctly.
This will happen in the course of the next months.
On top of this big milestone, we have published a HORNET Docker image.
It is available on the Docker Hub. This way you do not have to build the Docker image by yourself anymore but can simply pull it from the Docker Hub:
https://hub.docker.com/r/gohornet/hornet
Docker can simplify the deployment of applications especially on a server.
Within our new Wiki you will find FAQs and tutorials to get HORNET up and running as quickly and easily as possible.
If you miss something, just open an issue and we will add the missing part. Since the Wiki is a repository, the community can also contribute to it.
No coding skills needed. For example add a tutorial to get HORNET running on your favorite hardware.
Another step to make the HORNET setup even easier are the DEB and RPM packages introduced with HORNET 0.3.0.
With these packages, you no longer need to worry about setting up a systemd service or creating a user. All you need to do is to edit your HORNET configuration files and start HORNET.
You can find these packages on our HORNET releases site:
https://github.com/gohornet/hornet/releases/latest
A big thank you to the community members nuriel77 and Brootux who originally added this.
Also introduced with HORNET 0.3.0 was the neighbors configuration hot reloading. This way you do not have to restart HORNET to add new neighbors through the neighbors configuration anymore.
Just edit your neighbors configuration file and save it. HORNET will automatically reload the changes.
And if you are using the API to add or remove neighbors, HORNET will edit your neighbors configuration as well.
All these new features make HORNET easy to set up and use. This was the goal of milestone 5.
Now that HORNET has achieved feature parity with IRI, the next steps are to optimize HORNET and fixing bugs.
Please keep testing HORNET as extensively as in the past weeks and report bugs or missing features.
And of course we will continue to work closely with the great GoShimmer team. By working together on our common code base called hive.go, we can combine the best of both projects to strengthen GoShimmer and HORNET.
We are really looking forward to the release of GoShimmer 0.1.0, which you should definitely check out!
We would like to thank the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund (EDF) again.
Without the EDF the HORNET project would not be where it is now.
So if you have IOTA related open source projects in mind, submit them.
Maybe you can realize them with the help of the EDF too.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned!
