Alloy Book

IPC Provider

The IPC (Inter-Process Communication) transport allows our program to communicate with a node over a local Unix domain socket or Windows named pipe.

Using the IPC transport allows the ethers library to send JSON-RPC requests to the Ethereum client and receive responses, without the need for a network connection or HTTP server. This can be useful for interacting with a local Ethereum node that is running on the same network. Using IPC is faster than RPC, however you will need to have a local node that you can connect to.

Initializing an Ipc Provider

The recommended way of initializing an Ipc provider is by using the on_ipc method on the ProviderBuilder with an IpcConnect configuration.

//! Example of creating an IPC provider using the `on_ipc` method on the `ProviderBuilder`.

use alloy::providers::{IpcConnect, Provider, ProviderBuilder};
use eyre::Result;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> eyre::Result<()> {
    // Set up the IPC transport which is consumed by the RPC client.
    let ipc_path = "/tmp/reth.ipc";

    // Create the provider.
    let ipc = IpcConnect::new(ipc_path.to_string());
    let provider = ProviderBuilder::new().on_ipc(ipc).await?;

    Ok(())
}

An alternative way of initializing is to use the on_builtin method on the ProviderBuilder. This method will automatically determine the connection type (Http, Ws or Ipc) depending on the format of the URL. This method is particularly useful if you need a boxed transport.

//! Example of creating an IPC provider using the `on_builtin` method on the `ProviderBuilder`.

use alloy::providers::{Provider, ProviderBuilder};
use eyre::Result;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> eyre::Result<()> {
    // Create a provider with the IPC transport.
    let provider = ProviderBuilder::new().on_builtin("/tmp/reth.ipc").await?;

    Ok(())
}

Example: ipc

Example

To run this example:

• Clone the examples repository: git clone git@github.com:alloy-rs/examples.git
• Run: cargo run --example ipc

//! Example of using the IPC provider to get the latest block number.

use alloy::providers::{IpcConnect, Provider, ProviderBuilder};
use eyre::Result;

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<()> {
    // Set up the IPC transport which is consumed by the RPC client.
    let ipc_path = "/tmp/reth.ipc";

    // Create the provider.
    let ipc = IpcConnect::new(ipc_path.to_string());
    let provider = ProviderBuilder::new().on_ipc(ipc).await?;

    let latest_block = provider.get_block_number().await?;

    println!("Latest block: {latest_block}");

    Ok(())
}

Find the source code on Github here.