Create Instructions on how to setup a Trinity node for development

What is wrong?

The Trinity Readme only lists a couple of environment variables but has no further information on how to setup and run a Trinity node.

This should be fixed to make it easier to onboard new contributors.

Here’s what I tried to run the simple JSON-RPC server.

$ python3 trinity/rpc/server.py -db foo
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "trinity/rpc/server.py", line 114, in <module>
    privkey=ecies.generate_privkey(),
  File "/home/cburgdorf/Documents/hacking/py-evm/evm/chains/base.py", line 292, in configure
    return super().configure(name, **overrides)
  File "/home/cburgdorf/Documents/hacking/py-evm/evm/utils/datatypes.py", line 18, in configure
    "not found on the base class `{2}`".format(cls.__name__, key, cls)
TypeError: The LightChain.configure cannot set attributes that are not already present on the base class. The attribute `privkey` was not found on the base class `<class 'p2p.lightchain.LightChain'>`

It’s most likely related to the fact that I have not setup the environment variables. I actually have no idea how I would create a key to set as TRINITY_NODEKEY for instance.

The tinkerer in me tried to run TRINITY_NODEKEY='foo' && python3 trinity/rpc/server.py -db foo but that gave me the same error.

Long story short, the Readme should be newbie friendly and needs clear steps to get the node running.

How can it be fixed

If someone can give me a couple of pointers I can happily compile that into a Readme update

[cburgdorf]

I’m waiting for the dust to settle in https://github.com/ethereum/py-evm/pull/382 and then I will update the docs / Readme to make sure everyone has a smooth experience on how to run trinity with the different options.

[cburgdorf]

Closing as this is now covered by http://py-evm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing.html