Bitcoin Forum

I'm thinking about how to do higher-level testing of bitcoin, and I think we could get a lot of mileage out of a testing harness that works at the network protocol level.

I'm thinking of testing things like proper handling of block chain re-orgs and valid and invalid transactions.

Examples:

Block chain re-org test:

• Start a bitcoin client with an empty wallet and just the genesis block, -noirc listening on a non-standard port.
• test harness connects, then feeds it a pre-canned block chain
     ... then sends it a longer fork
• test harness makes sure client accepted the longer chain by sending it a getblocks messsage
    (or disconnects and re-connects and checks the start_height in the version message)
  

Valid/invalid transaction tests

• Start bitcoin client as above
• test harness connects, sends a series of valid and invalid transactions (via inv message and then responding to getdata).
• test harness checks to see if transactions were accepted or rejected by checking responses to getdata (should be no response for invalid transactions)

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A set of good data files with "tx" and "block" (and "inv" and all the rest) messages in them, combined with something like pexpect (http://pexpect.sourceforge.net/pexpect.html) could make a good test system. I'm thinking they should be human-readable (with a proxy listening tool or wireshark plugin or something that dumps bitcoin protocol into the human-readable form) but pretty low-level; maybe a version message (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification#version) looks like:


So, before I start working on something like this:  Anybody already doing something similar?

At the moment I am just parsing wireshark dumps for my protocol decoder, so I would be very interested in this too!
I can get a bit of a wiggle on with my python  stuff so you can at the protocol level decode it (well assuming I did it right), for decoding I more or imitated the look of a raw representation of blockexplorer. I am about 2 weeks away before I can release anything decent but I should be able to put something halfway working on within a couple of days, if anybody is interested.