Solana Router

Background & Motivation

Developers who choose to explore Solana currently have two options when getting started: they can either try to learn the Solana SDK or jump right into Anchor, the only high-level Solana framework (currently available). Those who choose the former hit a wall when they discover that virtually no online tutorials or "stack overflows" exist that go beyond the ubiquitous yet overly-simplistic, inextensible "Hello, world!" example. On the other hand, those who choose the latter hit a wall as soon as they encounter their first error while trying to go beyond the ideal use-cases around which Anchor was designed, because their fundamental understanding is handicapped by Anchor's all-powerful yet totally opaque macros.

In contrast, solana-router is somewhere in the middle. It builds upon the SDK but isn't a framework. It's more of a scaffold for new projects. It's the Bootstrap of Solana. Unlike Anchor, there are no magic macros that do all the heavy lifting. Instead, control flow is completely transparent and customizable, designed around the familiar metaphor of "request routing" found in traditional web frameworks. This design should make Solana development more intuitive for engineers comming from a background in full-stack web development.

Program Architecture

In a nutshell, the program receives a Solana instruction. Processing of the instruction is routed to an appropriate handler, based on the contents of its data.

Project Layout

• lib.rs - Defines main program entrypoint.
• accounts.rs - Account helper functions and data structures.
• auth.rs - Helper functions for auth-related tasks.
• router.rs - Routes instructions to available routes.
• routes
  • mod.rs - Registry for enabled routes.
  • create_lucky_number.rs - Example route to create a "lucky number".
  • update_lucky_number.rs - Example route to update a "lucky number".

Adding Routes

To add a route, either create a new file in src/routes or duplicate create_lucky_number.rs as a starting point. After this, register the your new module in src/routes/mod.rs by adding it to the ROUTES_ENABLED array. That's it!

Build & Deploy

To build and deploy the application, you can use bin/build and bin/deploy, respectively. If you want to know what these are doing, have a look inside. It's relatively straight-forward.