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Quickstart: Indexing Arbitrum custom data via Flair

Flair, Real-time and historical custom data indexing for any evm chain.

Flair offers reusable indexing primitives (such as fault-tolerant RPC ingestors, custom processors, re-org aware database integrations) to make it easy to receive, transform, store and access your onchain data.

flair architecture

Why Flair?​

Compared to other alternatives the main reasons are:

  • 🚀 Adopting parallel and distributed processing paradigm means high scalability and resiliency for your indexing stack. Instead of constrained sequential processing (e.g., Subgraph).
  • 🧩 Focused on primitives, which means on the left you plug-in an RPC and on the right you output the data to any destination database.
  • 🚄 Native real-time stream processing for certain data workload (such as aggregations, rollups) for things like total volume per pool, or total portfolio per user wallet.
  • ☁️ Managed cloud services avoid DevOps and irrelevant engineering costs for dApp developers.
  • 🧑‍💻 Avoid decentralization overhead (consensus, network hops, etc.) since we believe to enable best UX for dApps reading data must be as close to the developers as possible.

Features​

  • ✅ Listen to any EVM chain with just an RPC URL.
    • Free managed RPC URLs for +8 popular chains already included.
    • Works with both websocket and https-only RPCs.
  • ✅ Track and ingest any contract for any event topic.
    • Auto-track new contracts deployed from factory contracts.
  • ✅ Custom processor scripts with Javascript runtime (with Typescript support)
    • Make external API or Webhook calls to third-party or your backend.
    • Get current or historical USD value of any ERC-20 token amount of any contract address on any chain.
    • Use any external NPM library.
  • ✅ Stream any stored data to your destination database (Postgres, MongoDB, MySQL, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Timescale, etc.).

Getting Started​

1️⃣ Clone the starter boilerplate template and follow the instructions

git clone https://github.com/flair-sdk/starter-boilerplate.git
# ... follow instructions in README.md
info

Boilerplate instructions will create a new cluster, generate an API Key, and set up a manifest.yml to index your first contract with sample custom processor scripts.

Learn more about the structure of manifest.yml.

2️⃣ Configure Arbitrum RPC nodes

Set a unique namespace, Arbitrum chainId and RPC endpoint in your config. Remember that you can add up to ten RPC endpoints for resiliency.

{
  'cluster': 'dev',
  'namespace': 'my-awesome-arbitrum-indexing-dev',
  'indexers':
    [
      {
        'chainId': 42161,
        'enabled': true,
        'ingestionFilterGroup': 'default',
        'processingFilterGroup': 'default',
        'sources': [
            # Highly-recommended to have at least 1 websocket endpoint
            'wss://arbitrum-one.publicnode.com',
            # You can put multiple endpoints for failover
            'https://arbitrum.llamarpc.com',
          ],
      },
    ],
}

3️⃣ Sync some historical data using backfill command. Remember that enabled: true flag in your config enabled your indexer to capture data in real-time already.

# backfill certain contracts or block ranges
pnpm flair backfill --chain 42161 --address
0x22dc069183f85a8473553e32b59efc9fec506baf -d backward --max-blocks 10000
# backfill for a specific block number, if you have certain events you wanna test with
pnpm flair backfill --chain 42161 -b 132763420
# backfill for the recent data in the last X minute
pnpm flair backfill --chain 42161 --min-timestamp="30 mins ago" -d backward

4️⃣ Query your custom indexed data.

5️⃣ Stream the data to your own database.

Examples​

Explore real-world usage of Flair indexing primitives for various use-cases.

DeFi​

NFT​

Need help?​

Our engineers are available to help you at any stage.