Testing web3 applications with BuildBear: how to get started?
Are you tired of grappling with the complexities of testing decentralized applications (DApps) on blockchain platforms? In this article, we overview the challenges faced by developers when testing DApps. But more important, we learn how modern Cloud DevTools like BuildBear streamlines DApp development and testing, empowering developers like never before.
Introduction:
Web3 testing process or testing decentralized applications (Dapps) on blockchain platforms is a challenging endeavor, often entangled with complexities arising from the decentralized nature of these applications and the underlying blockchain technology. One of the primary challenges is interacting with the blockchain network itself. Deploying a DApp directly onto the mainnet can be costly, both in terms of resources and finances. On the other hand, setting up a local blockchain network for testing purposes can lead to headaches due to computational limitations and intricate configurations.
In this introductory guide, we’ll explore this unique challenges and how BuildBear, a DevTool designed for blockchain projects, offers a solution to simplify this process significantly.
Challenges in Testing DApps
Testing decentralized applications (DApps) on blockchain platforms presents several unique challenges due to the decentralized nature of these applications and the underlying blockchain technology. Firstly and mainly, testing DApps requires interacting with the blockchain network. You hardly decide to roll-out your dApp at a mainnet at once due to the high costs in all senses of this action. To launch network locally in the same time could end up with real headache because of the lack of computational power in conjunction with a complexity of the required settings.
Let’s overview some issues you can stumble upon with easy.
(1). For instance, blockchain applications often involve managing large amounts of data stored on the blockchain. Testing data-intensive operations such as querying, updating, or deleting data can be challenging, especially considering the immutability and transparency of blockchain data. Especially, when your locally deployed blockchain network suffers congestion.
(2). Further, DApps interact with one or multiple smart contracts. The complexity of smart contract logic, the intricacy of interaction procedures with them and the lack of traditional debugging tools can make this challenging. Especially, when your locally deployed blockchain doesn’t contain related smart-contracts, which your dApp needs. These smart-contracts do present on the mainnet, however were not copied for some reason.
(3). And of course, you will need a set of test wallets to simulate the interaction of different users with your decentralized application. But it’s not a trivial task. Each blockchain platform has its own procedures and tools for topping up test wallets. Faucets (a faucet, in the context of blockchain technology, is a service that provides users with small amounts of test tokens for free on blockchain testnets) often impose limits on the number of test tokens a user can request within a certain time frame to prevent abuse. Testers often need to try multiple faucets or wait for tokens to become available. All these add to the complexity of the process.
In essence, testing dApps is the process is less predictable and more confusing compared to traditional testing environments.
Introducing BuildBear: Streamlining DApp Testing
And here we can leverage from https://www.buildbear.io to ease this painful process.
BuildBear is a Cloud DevTool designed to ensure minimization of efforts, needed your blockchain based project becomes a production-ready. BuildBear offers a comprehensive solution to address the challenges encountered in testing Dapps.
This DevTool simplifies the process by:
- Fast Creation of Cloud Sandbox: BuildBear enables quick creation of cloud Sandboxes, eliminating the need for complex local network setups. You can easily fork your testnet from major blockchain networks with just a few clicks.
- Scalable Resources: BuildBear automatically scales computational resources to match your DApp’s requirements, ensuring optimal performance without the hassle of manual adjustments.
- Test Wallet Management: BuildBear allows painless creation of multiple test accounts with sufficient balances, because BuildBear doesn’t restrict in any way distribution of Native or ERC20 tokens.
But let’s discover on the own, how easy to start using this DevTool for testing purposes.
Getting Started with BuildBear
To begin, you need just a Google account. The registration process takes literally a few seconds.
And now you can create your first sandbox.
We choose Polygon to fork from:
Then choose that we make fork from Mainnet:
Then, at the next screen, just confirm your selection and go-ahead. That’s all.
Now we can see at Dashboard our new personal test network forked from Polygon Mainnet:
It usually takes short to go alive state. And it is ready for usage.
The next task in setting up a local testing environment is to teach Metamask to work with this network. Just in case, a note about the fact that many prefer to use Metamask rather than other crypto wallets for debugging process, because Metamask is by far the most developed wallet in terms of working with test networks. Other crypto wallets have less weak support for both custom blockchain networks and custom ERC20 tokens on these networks, so with them testing and debugging, which are already difficult, become an almost impossible task.
After the network becomes active, you should see the following button on your Dashboard:
You have to click on it. After this, it will take a noticeable time (several long seconds) for the Metamask window to open, requesting a confirmation the addition of a new chain. Perhaps, it is worth mention that the wallet with which you log in to Metamask must exist on the Polygon mainnet (or blockchain on which you just created your private test network).
Confirm. Again, it takes some time to confirm adding the network to the wallet, but everything should end successfully.
If you had Matic (or another native token in a case of other chain) on this wallet on Polygon mainnet, then you should see these tokens on the balance of the wallet on the newly created test network.
Great! We have just connected Metamask to our private test chain, forked from Polygon, and now we need to top up our wallet balance. BuildBear has an Open Faucet button for this (on the main Dashboard screen). Click on it, and you will be taken to the token distribution form. Here we need to either manually enter the address of the wallet we want to top up in the input field or connect Metamask, and it will substitute the value:
Then we simply specify the amounts (in reasonable ranges, of course) and top up the wallet.
BuildBear warns nobly that MetaMask may not immediately display your updated balance. In any case, we should see our Native Tokens on the balance of the specified address wallet.
However, MetaMask does not display ERC20 tokens on test chains by default.
They must be set manually. And here’s how we’ll do it.
You need to click on the Import Tokens link in Metamask:
Then copy paste the contract address from the BuildBear Faucet screen into the Token contract address field:
And on the following screens, simply confirm the action.
As a result of these settings, you can now see on your test wallet balance the assets just credited from BuildBear Faucet that are available exclusively on your private test network:
Congratulations!
We have just, in a few simple steps, deployed our own private blockchain network based on the current state of Polygon mainnet, then connected this network to the Metamask crypto wallet and top-upped it with the required number of test Native and ERC20 tokens. Now we are fully ready to start interacting with our decentralized application on our test chain.
Isn’t it all very easy and fast? And what’s very attractive about this solution is that you don’t have to mess around with the intricacy of configuration files, because everything is done through an intuitive user interface. And besides, the big advantage of this solution is that you can start using it absolutely free. Isn’t it remarkable how BuildBear simplifies the otherwise intricate process of testing decentralized applications?
But that is not the all. In the next article we will use the results of the settings made and see how easy it is to connect your web3 application frontend to work with a test private blockchain network.
Conclusion
In summary, this article explored the challenges of testing decentralized applications (DApps) on blockchain platforms and introduced BuildBear as a solution. We discussed the complexities involved in interacting with blockchain networks, managing data, smart contracts, and test wallets. BuildBear offers streamlined solutions such as fast cloud Sandbox creation, scalable resources, and easy test wallet management. With an intuitive interface and free access, BuildBear simplifies the testing process for developers. In the next article, we’ll further explore how to leverage BuildBear for web3 application development.
If you are interested in this topic, let’s delve into details together.
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