algodump

README

Algodump

This is a tool for monitoring the messages sent over Algorand's network protocol.

By default, the tool connects to a network in the same way that algod does, using SRV records and connecting to 4 relays from that list.

You can change the network by using the -network flag; you will likely also need to specify the correct -genesis flag for that network (e.g., -network testnet -genesis testnet-v1.0).

You can also instruct algodump to connect to just one server. This may be useful if you want to debug a specific server, or if you want to avoid seeing the same message received from multiple relays. To do this, use the -server flag (e.g., -server r-po.algorand-mainnet.network:4160).

By default, algodump will print all messages received. If you want to print just some message types, use the -tags flag (e.g., -tags TX to only see transactions, or -tags AV to see votes). The full list of tag types is in protocol/tags.go.

Although algodump will print all message types, it might not know how to meaningfully display the contents of some message types. If you are trying to monitor messages that algodump doesn't know how to pretty-print, you will see just where the message came from, the message type, and the length of its payload. You can add more formatting code to print the contents of other messages by adding more cases to the switch statement in dumpHandler.Handle() in main.go.

Finally, algodump by default truncates the addresses it prints (e.g., the sender of a transaction or the address of a voter); you can use the -long flag to print full-length addresses.