Can someone suggest a better way to test transfers for development testing?

Question

I have made an experimental fork which was forked from the Monero v0.13 release. The forks main focus is to test post-quantum signature keys for Monero. Although it's working, it still has a lot of bugs and there is a lot to work on still.

I have decided to rebase our current code-base to Monero's master branch, to include fixes from Monero and hopefully increase stability. After rebasing and doing some manual merging (which still isn't complete), I encountered some newly introduced functions that are somewhat blocking the old flow that I have, especially in transfers.

I am asking for your help on what better way to test transfers across multiple wallet addresses. I think I am doing this in an inefficient way for testing stuff and it would be great if you can share some of your experiences in testing Monero.

As for now, this is what I've been doing:

1. Start daemon with args --testnet --offline --fixed-difficulty 10 --log-level 2 --detach.
2. Start the wallet with args --testnet --log-level 4, then generate new wallet, then call it wallet1.
3. Kill wallet-cli, Do the same as step #2, then call the wallet wallet2.
4. At this point, I just switch to wallet1 start mining, then do a transfer in wallet2.
5. So wallet2 doesn't receive the transfer funds at all, maybe because they are sharing a daemon.

So this what I've been doing badly, and I know it's wrong. Another way I tried was to launch a VPS as secondary wallet and do the transfer there. That seemed to work but very inefficiently.

Can you share some of our manual transfer tests for a single machine, like running 2 nodes in a single system please?

Please note that I have not yet included a lot of Monero features, one of which is subaddress.

Thanks. Joseph

Answer 1

You need to run a private testnet. Instructions can be found here: https://github.com/moneroexamples/private-testnet

Without it being private, your mined blocks wont make it onto the real testnet chain because you are mining with a lowered difficulty due to you using the --fixed-difficulty 10 option, and they wont get broadcast due to you using the --offline flag.

Follow the instructions linked above and you'll have a private testnet to play/test with.