Erst By Hintents

Erst is a specialized developer tool for the Stellar network, designed to solve the "black box" debugging experience on Soroban.

Status: Active Development (Pre-Alpha) Focus: Soroban Error Decoding & Transaction Replay

Scope & Objective

The primary goal of erst is to clarify why a Stellar smart contract transaction failed.

Currently, when a Soroban transaction fails on mainnet, developers receive a generic XDR error code. erst aims to bridge the gap between this opaque network error and the developer's source code.

Core Features (Planned):

1. Transaction Replay: Fetch a failed transaction's envelope and ledger state from an RPC provider.
2. Local Simulation: Re-execute the transaction logically in a local environment.
3. Trace decoding: Map execution steps and failures back to readable instructions or Rust source lines.

Usage (MVP)

Debugging a Transaction

Fetches a transaction envelope from the Stellar Public network and prints its XDR size (Simulation pending).

./erst debug <transaction-hash>

Documentation

• Architecture Overview: Deep dive into how the Go CLI communicates with the Rust simulator, including data flow, IPC mechanisms, and design decisions.
• Project Proposal: Detailed project proposal and roadmap.
• Environment Variables: Complete reference for all configuration options and environment variables.

Technical Analysis

The Challenge

Stellar's soroban-env-host executes WASM. When it traps (crashes), the specific reason is often sanitized or lost in the XDR result to keep the ledger size small.

The Solution Architecture

erst operates by:

1. Fetching Data: Using the Stellar RPC to get the TransactionEnvelope and LedgerFootprint (read/write set) for the block where the tx failed.
2. Simulation Environment: A Rust binary (erst-sim) that integrates with soroban-env-host to replay transactions.
3. Execution: Feeding the inputs into the VM and capturing diagnostic_events.

For a detailed explanation of the architecture, see docs/architecture.md.

How to Contribute

We are building this open-source to help the entire Stellar community.

🗳️ Vote on Features

Help shape the future of Erst! Vote on feature requests using GitHub Discussions:

• Browse and vote on Feature Requests
• Add a 👍 reaction to features you'd like to see prioritized
• Submit your own ideas for community feedback

See our CONTRIBUTING.md for the full feature request process.

Prerequisites

• Go 1.21+
• Rust (for building the simulator binary)
• Stellar CLI (for comparing results)

Getting Started

1. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/dotandev/hintents.git
   cd hintents

2. Build the Rust simulator:

   cd simulator
   cargo build --release
   cd ..

3. Run tests:

   go test ./...

Development Roadmap

See docs/proposal.md for the detailed proposal.

1. Phase 1: Research RPC endpoints for fetching historical ledger keys.
2. Phase 2: Build a basic "Replay Harness" that can execute a loaded WASM file.
3. Phase 3: Connect the harness to live mainnet data.

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Erst is an open-source initiative. Contributions, PRs, and Issues are welcome.

🚀 Version 2.0 Highlights

Phase 9 introduces a stability and analytics-focused upgrade, including:

• Improved system reliability and error handling
• Enhanced analytics and telemetry support
• UX refinements across CLI and simulator
• Cross-environment consistency (local, Docker, CI)

This release prepares the project for future scalability and feature expansion.

Erst is an open-source initiative. Contributions, PRs, and Issues are welcome.