Locally testing a solver with the CoW Protocol orderflow
CoW Protocol infrastructure is a lot of services running together in herd harmony, which is a bit intimidating at the beginning. Before proceeding, it would be advisable to read the architectural overview to get a better understanding of how CoW Protocol works and its entities.
In order to test a solver against CoW Protocol's orderflow, one needs to locally run the following components
- autopilot, which will be configured to point, for example, to the production orderbook and to send the auctions to a local driver.
- driver, which will receive auctions from the autopilot and forward them to the solver engine
- the solver engine that is meant to be tested, run as a local http server able to receive
/solverequests from the driver and respond to them.
It is assumed you have rust setup correctly with rustup.
The repository where all the backend services can be found is this one: https://github.com/cowprotocol/services. Here are the main instructions to run the autopilot and the driver.
For the autopilot, we run
cargo run --bin autopilot -- --skip-event-sync true --node-url $NODE_URL --shadow https://api.cow.fi/mainnet --drivers "mysolver1|http://localhost:11088/mysolver1"
where one needs to set the NODE_URL appropriately (e.g., a free Infura endpoint).
CoW Protocol services infrastructure can be very heavy on RPC resource consumption. Be careful if using with post-paid plans, it's recommended to keep a close eye on RPC resource consumption.
For the driver, we run
cargo run -p driver -- --config driver.config.toml --ethrpc $NODE_URL
where one needs to configure driver.config.toml to point to their solver engine. A sample such file can be found here.
Once the above are set up and running, one can then start testing their solver engine against one of the following orderbooks:
| Orderbook URL | Network | Environment |
|---|---|---|
| https://barn.api.cow.fi/mainnet/api | Mainnet | Staging |
| https://api.cow.fi/mainnet/api | Mainnet | Production |
| https://barn.api.cow.fi/xdai/api | Gnosis Chain | Staging |
| https://api.cow.fi/xdai/api | Gnosis Chain | Production |
| https://barn.api.cow.fi/arbitrum_one/api | Arbitrum One | Staging |
| https://api.cow.fi/arbitrum_one/api | Arbitrum One | Production |
| https://barn.api.cow.fi/sepolia/api | Sepolia | Staging |
| https://api.cow.fi/sepolia/api | Sepolia | Production |