Migrating Substrate network starter library from Polkadot-launch to Parachain-launch
Since the Polkadot-Launch library became deprecated, many projects may be looking for a maintained alternative. One of the maintained alternatives is Parachain-launch. While they have similar functionality Parachain-launch offers a bit more features.
Migrating to a new library might prove to be challenging sometimes. Speaking from experience, ParaSpell✨ had exactly the same issue.
The prerequisites, that your network nodes must have are simple:
- Docker image
- Local node name (eg. karura-dev)
That’s it. While it was necessary to have all nodes compiled on the machine locally when using Polkadot-launch, Parachain-launch will only pull docker images that do not require lengthy compilation.
How would Polkadot-launch library configuration file look like containing the relay chain & karura node?
What would the Parachain-launch library containing the same configuration look like?
We can see, that configuration has very similar logic, however, the key differences are, that in Parachain-launch is an image instead of a bin and “volumePath” which specifies the path to mount volume and base path. It is set as /data by default. Flags under Parachains can also be divided into flags related to Parachain and flags related to Relay chain in regards to Parachain. Both libraries offer the ability to override genesis to some extent. Files have different extensions. While Polkadot-launch uses .json extension, Parachain-launch uses .yml extension.
If you plan on building your own network and cannot decide which Substrate network starter to choose we recommend to only use maintained ones. There are currently two alternatives to Polkadot-launch that are getting well-known.
In case that you want to try deprecated library also:
