Hermes

Hermes - Rust Relayer (Informal Systems)

Official documentation: https://hermes.informal.systems/documentation

1. Install Rust Dependencies

You will need rust, build-essential and git installed to follow these instructions:

# rust:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

# build-essential:
sudo apt-get install build-essential -y

# git:
sudo apt install git-all -y

2. Building Hermes

For preparation, we will create a dedicated user to run Hermes. Following command will also create home directory for the new user.

sudo useradd -m -d /ibc/hermes hermes

We will next switch to the hermes user and create a directory where we will compile the relayer software.Open the generated ~/.relayer/config/config.yaml file,

sudo sudo -u hermes -s
mkdir /ibc/hermes/source
mkdir /ibc/hermes/bin
cd /ibc/hermes/source

Now is time to clone the source repository and build it. Note that we need to checkout the latest release.

git clone https://github.com/informalsystems/ibc-rs.git hermes
cd hermes
git checkout v0.9.0
cargo build --release
cp target/release/hermes ~/bin
cd

Next we will check that the newly built hermes version is the correct one:

hermes@demo:~$ bin/hermes version
Nov 04 15:52:48.299  INFO ThreadId(01) using default configuration from '/ibc/hermes/.hermes/config.toml'
hermes 0.9.0

3. Configuring Hermes

Choose your favourite editor and edit the following configuration template to mach your setup. There are features like telemetry and rest API that you can enable, but they are not necessary, so they are left out from this tutorial.

Open config

nano $HOME/.hermes/config.toml

Edit the config

[mode.clients]
enabled = true
refresh = true
misbehaviour = false

[mode.connections]
enabled = true

[mode.channels]
enabled = true

[mode.packets]
enabled = true

[[chains]]
id = 'secret-4'
rpc_addr = 'http://127.0.0.1:26657'
websocket_addr = 'ws://127.0.0.1:26657/websocket'
grpc_addr = 'http://127.0.0.1:9090'
rpc_timeout = '10s'
account_prefix = 'secret'
key_name = 'secret-relayer'
store_prefix = 'ibc'
default_gas = 350000
max_gas = 1500000
gas_multiplier = 1.2
max_msg_num = 30
max_tx_size = 2097152
clock_drift = '5s'
max_block_time = '30s'
trusting_period = '14days'
memo_prefix = ''
[chains.trust_threshold]
numerator = '1'
denominator = '3'
[chains.gas_price]
price = 0.1
denom = 'uscrt'
[chains.packet_filter]
policy = 'allow'
list = [
    ['transfer', 'channel-1'], #osmosis
]
[chains.address_type]
derivation = 'cosmos'


[[chains]]
id = 'osmosis-1'
rpc_addr = 'http://127.0.0.1:26557'
websocket_addr = 'ws://127.0.0.1:26557/websocket'
grpc_addr = 'http://127.0.0.1:9091'
rpc_timeout = '10s'
account_prefix = 'osmo'
key_name = 'osmosis-relayer'
store_prefix = 'ibc'
default_gas = 500000
max_gas = 1500000
gas_multiplier = 1.2
max_msg_num = 20
max_tx_size = 209715
clock_drift = '20s'
max_block_time = '10s'
trusting_period = '10days'
memo_prefix = ''
[chains.trust_threshold]
numerator = '1'
denominator = '3'
[chains.gas_price]
price = 0.0025
denom = 'uosmo'
[chains.packet_filter]
policy = 'allow'
list = [
    ['transfer', 'channel-88'],
]
[chains.address_type]
derivation = 'cosmos'

Want to relay for all/more existing connections on secret? -- check the channel database

You can validate the configuration with following:

hermes@Demo:~$ bin/hermes -c .hermes/config.toml config validate
Success: "validation passed successfully"

4. Setting Up Wallets

We will need to create a new wallet, import it, and ultimately fund it. Note the unique derivation paths for secret.

hermes -c .hermes/config.toml keys restore secret-4 -m "mnemonics" -n "secret-relayer" -p "m/44'/529'/0'/0/0"

hermes -c .hermes/config.toml keys restore osmosis-1 -m "mnemonics" -n "osmosis-relayer"

If you want to make sure the keys got imported, you can check them with following command:

bin/hermes keys list secret-4

5. Testing the setup

Let's do a quick test to see things work properly.

Validate your ~/.hermes/config.toml file by running:

hermes config validate

Perform a health check:

hermes health-check

You should see a similar output as the one below:

INFO ThreadId(01) [secret-4] chain is healthy
INFO ThreadId(01) [osmosis-1] chain is healthy

6. Run hermes

bin/hermes start

Once we see things load up correctly and there are no fatal errors, we can break out of hermes with ctrl-c.

Configuring systemd

Now we will setup hermes to be run by systemd, and to start automatically on reboots.

Create the following configuration to /etc/systemd/system/hermes.service

[Unit]
Description=Hermes IBC relayer
ConditionPathExists=/ibc/hermes/hermes
After=network.target secret-node.service cosmos.service osmo.service

[Service]
Type=simple
User=hermes
WorkingDirectory=/ibc/hermes
ExecStart=/ibc/hermes/hermes start
Restart=always
RestartSec=2

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then we will start hermes with the newly created service and enable it. Note that this step is done from your normal user account that has sudo privileges, so no longer as hermes.

sudo systemctl start hermes.service
sudo systemctl enable hermes.service