Getting verbose logs from counterparty-lib (counterparty-server)

Development Counterparty
1

When it’s all good you’ll get meaningful errors or method not found which of course means you’re using a wrong method (or wrong API, for example counterblock instead of counterparty).

Other times something else is wrong and I want to figure out why.

The logging is configured in counterpartylib/lib/log.py. I can configure the requests library to propagate logs to counterparty-lib and then run counterparty-server with --verbose to turn on debugging.

    requests_log = logging.getLogger("requests")
    requests_log.setLevel(log_level)
    requests_log.propagate = True
    urllib3_log = logging.getLogger('urllib3')
    urllib3_log.setLevel(log_level)
    urllib3_log.propagate = True

That gives us a bit more info in counterparty-server’s server.log, but still not enough to see exactly what the hell is going on with the method that’s “not found”.

Next, I try counterparty-lib-master/counterpartylib/lib/api.py.

def init_api_access_log(app):
    """Initialize API logger."""
    loggers = (logging.getLogger('werkzeug'), app.logger)
    log.setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
    log.addHandler(handler)

I rebuild the code and start server.
I capture network packets on the loopback interface and voila, the trace is here!

{
	"method": "create_destroy",
	"params": {
		"encoding": "auto",
		"op_return_value": 0,
		"multisig_dust_size": 7799,
		"pubkey": ["0265f9763ea8f857571a003a9c7abddc9875a3dd921dbdb15c1659944869f945cd"],
		"regular_dust_size": 5429,
		"disable_utxo_locks": false,
		"allow_unconfirmed_inputs": true,
		"fee_per_kb": 25000,
		"source": "n4D7ndiC4yLZxhAf726uMHXC914sEuUAcg",
		"quantity": 10000,
		"dust_return_pubkey": null,
		"fee": null,
		"asset": "XCP",
		"tag": ""
	},
	"jsonrpc": "2.0",
	"id": 0
}

So what is the problem?

It seems that create_destroy method really does not exist! (see http://counterparty.io/docs/api/#actionwrite-api-function-reference). I should have checked this document first, but I was focusing on debugging the client, assuming that the API is there.

And yesterday I was told the destroy action in the counterparty-client calls the CP (asset) destroy method and that destructions table in Counterparty Sqlite3 DB is empty because no one has used the API on mainnet.

It took me only 3 hours of searching in wrong places to find the truth :-). It now seems that one uses the API because it’s not there.

2

To clarify the issue with findings from a follow up discussion in Slack:

  • destroy action exists in counterparty-cli, but on testnet counterparty-server returns a method not found error
  • the official API document does not mention create_destroy at all (officially, it does not exist)
  • the source code (counterparty-lib) does contain destroy method, but it is not enabled on mainnet (and this is returned in RPC JSON response if you try to use create_destroy). But I was testing on testnet and there you get method not found (no mention about the method not being enabled at all)

Therefore the API documentation is correct, despite the presence of destroy in the source code and availability in counterparty-client.

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