Developping on Tezos with custom gas restrictions

Then next Tezos Protocol update, Carthage net, will increase the gas restrictions allowing the development of hungrier smart contracts. In this post, we document how to update these hard limits to arbitrary values letting developers implement contracts in view of protocol updates. For instance, the gas restrictions will increase by multiple folds before the end of the year.

We develop on the Tezos sandbox, the simplest is to pull Yourlabs' docker image:

docker run -t -p 8732:8732 yourlabs/tezos

But since we want to modify some of the sandbox parameters, we will need to the sources to rebuild the image:

git clone git@yourlabs.io:oss/containers.git
cd containers/tezos

We not want to modify the entry hard_gas_limit_per_operation and hard_gas_limit_per_block of the file sandbox-parametrs.json to 2,000,000 and 20,000,000 respectively and rebuild the image:

sed -i 's/"hard_gas_limit_per_operation": "[0-9]*"/"hard_gas_limit_per_operation": "9000000"/g' sandbox-parameters.json
sed -i 's/"hard_gas_limit_per_block": "[0-9]*"/"hard_gas_limit_per_block": "90000000"/g' sandbox-parameters.json
cat sandbox-parameters.json | jq .hard_gas_limit_per_operation  # => 9000000

We can now build and run the docker image with port redirection so we can communicate with the sandbox from outside the docker:

docker build -t tz-sandbox .
docker run -t -d -p 8732:8732 tz-sandbox

This will start the sandbox in a container bridging the standard port. You can verify that it works by running the following command:

curl http://localhost:8732/chains/main/blocks/head/context/constants | jq .hard_gas_limit_per_operation # => 9000000

As you can see, by curling the sandbox API, our constant was updated

curl http://localhost:8732/chains/main/blocks/head/context/constants | jq .hard_gas_limit_per_block # => 9000000

We will now run a Michelson contract that consumes over 800,000 gas for --arg 260000:

parameter int ;
storage unit ;
code { CAR ;
       DUP ; NEQ ; LOOP { PUSH int 1 ; SWAP ; SUB ; DUP ; NEQ } ;
       DROP ;
       UNIT ;
       NIL operation ;
       PAIR }

docker exec $(docker ps -q) /bin/bash -c 'tezos-client originate contract TEST_GAS_CONTRACT transferring 42 from bootstrap1 running test-contract.tz --burn-cap 5'

docker exec $(docker ps -q) /bin/bash -c 'tezos-client transfer 5 from bootstrap1 to TEST_GAS_CONTRACT --arg 360000'

As you can see, this operation used 1367765 gas which is well above the Babylon net gas limits. We can now try to execute a much hungrier contract and see that it fails as expected:

docker exec $(docker ps -q) /bin/bash -c 'tezos-client transfer 5 from bootstrap1 to TEST_GAS_CONTRACT --arg 3600000'

The operation failed as it is over the gas limit per operation.