Gateway to Hyperledger Fabric

Due to the fact that Hyperledger Fabric network channel can constantly change, the peer, orderer and CA components, contributed by the different organizations in the network, will come and go, the need of reconfiguration for the Hyperledger Explorer becomes very difficult to maintain and get real time updates of the fabric network.

After the introduction of the “fabric-network” module by the Hyperledger Fabric SDK for NodeJS. Hyperledger Explorer uses Gateway, and a connection profile to connect to the fabric network. Read more about Gateway.

FabricGateway shown in the diagram below.

Configuration using Gateway and connection profile

One of the requirements to connect to a Hyperledger Fabric network to receive blocks, transactions, and other is to configure Hyperledger Explorer to be able to connect to the default fabric network. For this we tried to have a minimal as possible configuration by taking advantage of the latest Hyperledger Fabric Service Discovery, and Gateway. As of now Hyperledger Explorer is able to connect only to a single Hyperledger Fabric network, and we believe that in the next releases we may be able to have more than one network connected.

In previous versions we had a single file config.json file that was used to configure Hyperledger Explorer, after the minimal configuration we divided in two parts, config.json, and connection-profile, that described the network properties.

Sample Hyperledger Explorer configuration with one of the fabric sample network first-network, described below:

On another terminal:

cd blockchain-explorer/app/platform/fabric

Modify config.json to point to your first-network network connection-profile:

{
        "network-configs": {
                "first-network": {
                        "name": "first-network",
                        "profile": "./connection-profile/first-network.json"
                }
        },
        "license": "Apache-2.0"
}

"first-network" is the name of your connection profile, and can be changed to any name.

"name" is a name you want to give to your fabric network, you can change only value of the key "name".

"profile" is the location of your connection profile, you can change only value of the key "profile"

Modify connection profile in the JSON file first-network.json:
Change "fabric-path" to your fabric network disk path in the first-network.json file:
/blockchain-explorer/app/platform/fabric/connection-profile/first-network.json
Provide the full disk path to the adminPrivateKey config option, it usually ends with "_sk", for example:

"/fabric-path/fabric-samples/first-network/crypto-config/peerOrganizations/org1.example.com/users/Admin@org1.example.com/msp/keystore/aaacd899a6362a5c8cc1e6f86d13bfccc777375365bbda9c710bb7119993d71c_sk"

"adminUser" is the the admin user of the network, in this case it's fabric CA or an identity user.

"adminPassword" is the password for the admin user.

"enableAuthentication" is a flag to enable authentication using a login page, setting to false
will skip authentication.