simple-anvil-image

A docker image that installs Foundry and runs an Anvil node. This package was developed to support Ponder's benchmarks.

Usage

This image was designed to be used as a service in GitHub Action workflows (rather than a workflow step that installs Foundry on the host machine). Services are sometimes preferable to running processes directly on the host machine, because they tend to start up faster and networking is simpler.

Supported environment variables

• ANVIL_FORK_URL - An RPC URL to use for forking. If this is not provided, the Anvil node will not fork.
• ANVIL_FORK_BLOCK_NUMBER - The block number to fork from. If this is not provided, the Anvil node will fork from the latest block.

Details

• The --host CLI flag is hard-coded to 0.0.0.0 This is required for Docker networking to work as expected.
• You can run this image locally, e.g. docker run -p 8545:8545 -e ANVIL_FORK_URL=https://eth-mainnet.g.alchemy.com/v2/... simple-anvil-image and it should serve requests at http://localhost:8545.
• Rather than passing CLI flags to configure settings like the fork block number and automining behavior, you can configure these values after the service has already started using the anvil_ RPC methods. The viem Test Client makes this very easy.

Sample GitHub Action workflow

• The service will be available at http://localhost:8545 in any workflow steps that run directly on the runner (like pnpm bench shown below).
• The service will be available at http://anvil:8545 in any other services (such as the graph-node service shown below).

name: Bench

jobs:
  bench:
    name: Bench
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    services:
      anvil:
        image: ghcr.io/0xolias/simple-anvil-image:main
        env:
          ANVIL_FORK_URL: ${{ secrets.ANVIL_FORK_URL }}
          # If omitted, the Anvil node will fork from the latest block.
          ANVIL_FORK_BLOCK_NUMBER: 17500000
        ports:
          - 8545:8545
      graph-node:
        image: graphprotocol/graph-node
        env:
          # The Graph node can send requests to the Anvil node at http://anvil:8545.
          ethereum: mainnet:http://anvil:8545
        ports:
          - 8000:8000
    steps:
      - name: Clone repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      # The Anvil node will now be available at http://localhost:8545 in your workflow steps.
      - name: Bench
        run: pnpm bench

Control using a viem Test Client

This code would run as expected in the pnpm bench step of the workflow above.

import { type Chain, createTestClient, http } from "viem";
import { mainnet } from "viem/chains";

const anvil = {
  ...mainnet, // We are using a mainnet fork for testing.
  id: 1,
  rpcUrls: {
    default: {
      http: [`http://127.0.0.1:8545`],
      webSocket: [`ws://127.0.0.1:8545`],
    },
    public: {
      http: [`http://127.0.0.1:8545`],
      webSocket: [`ws://127.0.0.1:8545`],
    },
  },
} as Chain;

const testClient = createTestClient({
  chain: anvil,
  mode: "anvil",
  transport: http(),
});

async function resetAnvil() {
  await testClient.setAutomine(false);
  await testClient.setRpcUrl("https://quiknode.pro/...");
  await testClient.reset({ blockNumber: 16_000_000n });
}