Bokken: A Solana program debugging tool

Preamble

The goal of Bokken, like its namesake, is to have your programs practice their skills in a controlled environment before entering the real world. To achieve this goal, Bokken provides an emulated environment for your programs to execute in similar to the Truffle Suite for Ethereum.

This means you can write your integration tests in JS/TS using @solana/web3.js in order to test your Solana program and front-end code at the same time with instant-confirmation transactions!

Features

This project is still in early development. Because of this, not all Solana features are currently implemented/emulated.

• Implemented functionality
  • Program logging
  • System Program emulation (create account, transfer, alloc, etc.)
  • Cross-program invocations
  • Persistent state
  • State rollback (partial)
  • Return data (partial)
  • simulateTransaction
  • getAccountInfo
  • getBlockHeight
  • getLatestBlockhash (With fake data)
  • sendTransaction
  • signatureSubscribe
  • getSignatureStatuses
  • Partial sysvar support
    • clock (partial, slot number and unix time only)
    • Rent
• Pending features
  • Actual time-keeping, simulating consistent slot generation
  • Remaining sysvars
  • Importing state from pre-existing snapshots created with solana-ledger-tool (Mainnet-beta, pre-existing solana-test-validator ledgers, etc.)
  • Invoking pre-compiled SBF programs
  • Staking rewards emulation

How it works

Bokku aims to provide the following debugging features to solana program developers

• The ability to step through transaction instructions (like ethereum's remix IDE for example)
• The ability to capture stack traces, as attempting to capture one will currently just output the string <unsupported>

In order to achieve this, the basic premise behind Bokken is to compile your Solana program to your system's native platform. This enables the use of capturing stack traces as well as the ability to use pre-existing Rust debugging tools, such as the VSCode CodeLLDB extension.

This, combined with the solana_program crate's ability to specify custom solana-sycall implementations when not compiled to SBF/BPF, allows you to debug your programs in an enviroment which can closesly resemble that during normal program execution.

Usage

1. Create a new cargo project with the following dependencies. The bokken-runtime will use your program as a dependency and call its entrypoint function when executing transactions.

[dependencies]
bokken-runtime = "0.1"
your-program-crate-name-here = {path = "path/to/program/source"}
tokio = "1.0"
color-eyre = "0.5"

2. Use the provided macro from bokken-runtime to generate the main function for your debuggable program. Your main.rs should be similar to this:

bokken_runtime::bokken_program!(your_program_crate_name_here);

3. Confirm that your program compiles. The output should be similar to this

$ cargo run -- --help
A native-compiled Solana program to be used with Bokken

Usage: -s PATH -p PUBKEY

Available options:
    -s, --socket-path <PATH>   The unix socket of the Bokken instance to link to
    -p, --program-id <PUBKEY>  Program ID of this program
    -h, --help                 Prints help information
    -V, --version              Prints version information

4. Launch Bokken (Listens to 127.0.0.1:8899 by default)

bokken --socket-path /tmp/bokken.sock --save-path /tmp/bokken-data

5. Launch your program (from your newly-created project directory) and connect it to Bokken. The program ID can be any valid PublicKey.

cargo run -- --socket-path /tmp/bokken.sock --program-id YourAwesomeDebugab1eProgram1111111111111111

You should see a message saying "Registered new debugable program: YourAwesomeDebugab1eProgram1111111111111111 in Bokken's console"

Now you can send transactions to it to your hearts content!