An automated governance helper for Dash Masternodes.

Sentinel is an autonomous agent for persisting, processing and automating Dash governance objects and tasks. It is a Python application which runs alongside the DashCore instance on each Dash Masternode.

• Install
  • Dependencies
• Usage
• Configuration
• Troubleshooting
• Maintainer
• Contributing
• License

These instructions cover installing Sentinel on Ubuntu 16.04 / 18.04.

Make sure Python version 2.7.x or above is installed:

python --version

Update system packages and ensure virtualenv is installed:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get -y install python-virtualenv

Make sure the local DashCore daemon running is at least version 12.1 (120100)

$ dash-cli getinfo | grep version

Clone the Sentinel repo and install Python dependencies.

$ git clone https://github.com/dashpay/sentinel.git && cd sentinel
$ virtualenv ./venv
$ ./venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

Sentinel is "used" as a script called from cron every minute.

Set up a crontab entry to call Sentinel every minute:

$ crontab -e

In the crontab editor, add the lines below, replacing '/path/to/sentinel' to the path where you cloned sentinel to:

* * * * * cd /path/to/sentinel && ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.py >/dev/null 2>&1

Test the config by running tests:

$ ./venv/bin/py.test ./test

With all tests passing and crontab setup, Sentinel will stay in sync with dashd and the installation is complete

An alternative (non-default) path to the dash.conf file can be specified in sentinel.conf:

dash_conf=/path/to/dash.conf

To view debug output, set the SENTINEL_DEBUG environment variable to anything non-zero, then run the script manually:

$ SENTINEL_DEBUG=1 ./venv/bin/python bin/sentinel.py

@nmarley

Please follow the DashCore guidelines for contributing.

Specifically:

• Contributor Workflow

  To contribute a patch, the workflow is as follows:

  • Fork repository
  • Create topic branch
  • Commit patches

  In general commits should be atomic and diffs should be easy to read. For this reason do not mix any formatting fixes or code moves with actual code changes.

  Commit messages should be verbose by default, consisting of a short subject line (50 chars max), a blank line and detailed explanatory text as separate paragraph(s); unless the title alone is self-explanatory (like "Corrected typo in main.cpp") then a single title line is sufficient. Commit messages should be helpful to people reading your code in the future, so explain the reasoning for your decisions. Further explanation here.

Released under the MIT license, under the same terms as DashCore itself. See LICENSE for more info.