bitcoind mock

bitcoind mock is an approach to simulate bitcoind for unit testing. It is specially useful for Continuous integration (CI) tools.

The mock provides a JSON-RPC interface with some of the RPC commands available in bitcoind along with a zmq interface for transaction and block notification. The mock also provides additional endpoints to generate blocks on demand (/generate) and to create forks (/fork).

The mock can be run either by time, where blocks will be generated in fix time intervals, or by events where a block will be generated each time /generate is called.

This are the current partially covered commands:

decoderawtransaction:   querying for the decoding of a raw transaction will return a dictionary with a single
                        field: "txid".

sendrawtransaction:     sending a rawtransaction will notify our mining simulator to include such transaction in
                        a subsequent block (add it to mempool).

getrawtransaction:      requesting a rawtransaction from a txid will return a dictionary containing a single
                        field: "confirmations", since rawtransactions are only queried to check whether a
                        transaction has made it to a block or not.

getblockcount:          the block count represents the length of the longest chain.

getblock:               querying for a block will return a dictionary with three fields: "tx" representing a
                        list of transactions, "height" representing the block height and "hash" representing the
                        block hash.

getblockhash:           returns the hash of a block given its height.

getbestblockhash:       returns the hash of the block in the tip of the chain.

help:                   help is only used as a sample command to test if bitcoind is running when bootstrapping.
                        It will return a 200/OK with no data.

Known limitations

• The implemented commands do not return every single field that bitcoind would, only the most important ones (or the ones that I've required so for my own unit tests).

• The mock works well when interacting with via python but not if queried directly by bitcoin-cli (check #1).

• zmq only notifies about blocks being mined, but not about transactions.

• Requesting a fork while running the mock by time will not reset the timer for the block that will be mined on top of the forked one.

Dependencies

Refer to DEPENCENCIES.md.

Installation

You can get the package from PyPi:

pip install bitcoind-mock

Or install it manually (refer to INSTALL.md).

Contributing

If you'd like to add / extend any command, feel free to send a PR. We can make this as complete as we'd like by joining efforts :smile:

Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for the style guidelines to follow.