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Browsing Gno.land

Overview​

In this tutorial, you will learn how to browse realms and packages deployed to a Gno.land chain. You will understand how the Render method is utilized to achieve realm state visibility, and you will learn how to easily access realm APIs.

Prerequisites​

  • gnodev installed. Reference the Local Setup guide for steps

1. Start gnodev​

To browse Gno source code, we need two components:

  • a running gno.land node,
  • a gno.land source code viewer, like gnoweb

Luckily, gnodev comes prepackaged with both. To start, simply run gnodev in your terminal.

gnodev will start an in-memory node, as well as a gnoweb server:

gnodev

gnodev remembers the folder where it was installed, and loads the examples/ subfolder by default. By visiting http://localhost:8888, you will be able to see the gno.land home page:

homepage

2. Browsing Gno.land​

Package source code​

Packages in Gno.land usually have names resembling gno.land/p/<name>. Since packages do not contain state, only their source code can be viewed on-chain. To learn more about packages, check out the Packages concept page.

Let's take a specific example: the avl package, deployed at gno.land/p/demo/avl. To access the source code of the avl package, we can append the /p/demo/avl to our browser URL (from the homepage).

The final URL for the avl package source could be viewable at http://127.0.0.1:8888/p/demo/avl, if we followed default setup params, as we did in this guide.

gnoweb avl

From here, we can open any source code file of the deployed on-chain package and inspect its API.

Realm source code & state​

In contrast to Packages, Realms in Gno.land usually have names resembling gno.land/r/<name>.

Realms do contain state, and in addition to being able to view their source code on-chain, users can also view their internal state representation in the form of the Render() output. To learn more about realms, please check out the Realms concept page.

We can browse the realm Render() method output and source code in our browser. For example, the gnoland/blog realm is deployed at gno.land/r/gnoland/blog.

To view the internal realm state of the blog realm, we can append the /r/gnoland/blog to our browser URL (from the homepage).

The final URL for the blog realm internal state could be viewable at http://127.0.0.1:8888/r/gnoland/blog, if we followed default setup params, as we did in this guide.

blog_render

Render() is not required

Internal realm state does not have to be exposed through the Render() method of the realm, as it is not a requirement for deploying a Realm.

Additionally, to view the source code for the realm, we have two options:

blog_source

Finally, the [help] button takes us to the realm help page, where you will be able to see the user-facing API of the realm.

blog_help

This page will allow you to easily generate gnokey commands for interacting with the realm in question.

Conclusion​

That's it 🎉

You have successfully inspected the source code of a package and realm, and seen the on-chain state of the blog app. You have also learned about the [help] page that gnoweb provides.