Raft simulator with Golang

This project is a simulator for the Raft consensus protocol. It uses HTTP for inter-server communication, and a job scheduler for implementing polling logic.

Requirements:

• go 1.17+
• github.com/go-co-op/gocron 1.9.0+

Concepts

• Actor: The state machine Raft describes. An actor is either a leader, follower, or candidate at a time. Each actor maintains a list of logs.

• Server: Actor + communication methods.

How to run this project

• First, run go build to build the project. GO will automatically download package requirements for you. If it does not, run go get github.com/go-co-op/gocron to install the dependency.
• Running with config files:
  • If you wish to provide the server with some initial states, you can create a config file (see json files under actor_config for examples) and run ./main -f <config file name>
    • Note that the log of term 0 is required to avoid index out of bound problems
  • Or you can start a server with no logs at term 0. Run ./main -p <port number> -n <#peers> <peers...> E.g.: ./main -p 8080 -n 2 8081 8082
    • port_number: the port number you wish to have this server listen on for http traffic. E.g.: 8080
    • #peers: the number of peers you want to have in your deployment (excluding this one). E.g.: If you have 3 servers running, this number should be 2 for each of them
    • peers: list of port numbers for this server to send RPCs to. E.g.: If this server is on port 8080 and you have two other servers on 8081 and 8082, correspondingly, you should put 8081 8082 here

In order to be able to read the output logs for each server, we recommend to open a separate terminal window for each server.

How to append log to leader

Use postman or curl to send an http post request to http://localhost:<leader port number>/client-api with the following json-formatted payload:

{
    "req": "example command string"
}