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 connect_ipc method on the ProviderBuilder with an IpcConnect configuration.

//! Example of creating an IPC provider using the `connect_ipc` method on the `ProviderBuilder`.
 
use alloy::providers::{IpcConnect, Provider, ProviderBuilder};
use std::error::Error;
 
#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn Error>> {
    // 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().connect_ipc(ipc).await?;
 
    Ok(())
}