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Introduction 👋

Hello and welcome to our Harbor documentation! It's a pleasure to know that you are joining the ride into our testing haven. Before you get started, it is crucial to dive into the why's of Harbor in the world of Web3.0.

Why Harbor?​

With the proliferation of many new chains and an increasing number of dapps, developer activity across web3 has been steadily rising. While this is awesome on the one hand as consumers have many options to choose from, the truth is that the need for testing is high.

We aren't just talking about public Testnets. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

The truth is, not only are public Testnets sometimes unreliable, but public Testnets present the opportunity for people to dissect our smart contracts. This gives hackers the chance to find exploits before you do. So, when you finally deploy our smart contract and it accumulates tokens .. bam! All gone.

This is just the basic stuff. Imagine you needed to test cross-chain bridging or cross-chain dApp interactivity! It's one thing for having a smart contract living in two different chains .. but it's a whole different story when you start adding off-chain actors into the mix!

With the addition of off-chain actors, performing a simple test can take 15 minutes to hours! As a result, a thorough cross-chain testing session is swept under the carpet in order to satisfy release cycles. This is unfortunate as it almost always results in an undiscovered exploit by an opportunist. Billions of dollars worth of bridge exploits have taken place in 2022 alone!

At Harbor, we aim to reduce the complexity and time it takes to test your dApps. Whether it's a simple dApp running on one chain, or a cross-chain bridge with multiple off-chain actors, at Harbor we aim to provide one-click testing solutions at your fingertips. This will help Web3.0 developers:

  • Run a private Testnet running in the cloud to test between a team
  • Setup and run complex cross-chain testing quickly and efficiently, which allows developers to cover many more edge-cases
  • Provide instant logging to any actor in one command
  • Set up a token configuration sent to multiple Testing wallets when the Testnet is up

This is just our MVP! We have more exciting features to come.

So far, so good? Awesome! Let's dive right into the installation of our Harbor CLI.