Basics

A Connext node is an implementation of the Connext protocols. Anyone who is using Connext in any way should most likely be running a node.

Nodes take in the following: - Access to a user key, from which a ChannelSigner can be created. - etc.

There are two primary node implementations available right now, both written in Typescript: - server-node - browser-node

Server-Node vs. Browser-Node

In general, nodes expose very similar interfaces and behave very similarly. There are a few notable differences, however:

	Server-Node	Browser-Node
Interface(s)	gRPC and REST	typescript
Distribution	Docker image	npm
Environment Variables	Passed in via config-node.json file	Set via .env or passed in on instantiation
Key Management	Takes in a mnemonic and supports creating multiple signers by passing in an index. See more below.	Takes in a single ChannelSigner

Server-Node Specific Functionality

Using the Server Node JS Client

The server-node's HTTP requests are wrapped into a JS client. This can be installed into a standalone Node.js program by installing the @connext/vector-utils package. Minimally, the client is instantiated like so (assuming a local setup similar to make start-node or make start-duet):

import { RestServerNodeService } from "@connext/vector-utils";
import pino from "pino";

const alice = await RestServerNodeService.connect("http://localhost:8001", pino(), undefined, 0);

The client has wrapper methods for the server-node's REST interface, which implement the interface IServerNodeService.

Note: because the browser-node exposes a TS interface directly, there is no need to do this in the browser.

Indexed Engines

In most cases, the server-node manages a single private key and signs all channel operations with this key.

However, server-nodes also possess the ability to handle many different signers in the same stack concurrently. You can do this by specifying an index param in the connect method.

This functionality is possible in the server-node by deriving private keys from the mnemonic in the server-node's config (more info). By default, the server-node creates an engine at the index path "0" for convenience.

Below is an example of creating a new Engine instance. The index param is an integer between 0 and 2147483647 (2^32):

POST {{aliceUrl}}/node
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "index": 1234
}

The response to this request contains a signerAddress and publicIdentifier. Additional calls to the server node must include the publicIdentifier to specify which engine to use.