Ink tutorial: substrate-contracts-node does not produce blocks

Question

I am following the Ink tutorial at https://docs.substrate.io/tutorials/v3/ink-workshop/pt1/ .

When running substrate-contracts-node --dev no block is produced.

Only log line produced is:

2022-04-22 11:26:45 💻 Operating system: macos    
2022-04-22 11:26:45 💻 CPU architecture: aarch64    
2022-04-22 11:26:45 📦 Highest known block at #0    
2022-04-22 11:26:45 〽️ Prometheus exporter started at 127.0.0.1:9615    
2022-04-22 11:26:45 Listening for new connections on 127.0.0.1:9944.    
2022-04-22 11:26:46 Accepted a new tcp connection from 127.0.0.1:59063.    
2022-04-22 11:26:50 💤 Idle (0 peers), best: #0 (0x02ba…032a), finalized #0 (0x02ba…032a), ⬇ 0 ⬆ 0    
2022-04-22 11:26:55 💤 Idle (0 peers), best: #0 (0x02ba…032a), finalized #0 (0x02ba…032a), ⬇ 0 ⬆ 0    
2022-04-22 11:27:00 💤 Idle (0 peers), best: #0 (0x02ba…032a), finalized #0 (0x02ba…032a), ⬇ 0 ⬆ 0    
2022-04-22 11:27:05 💤 Idle (0 peers), best: #0 (0x02ba…032a), finalized #0 (0x02ba…032a), ⬇ 0 ⬆ 0    
2022-04-22 11:27:10 💤 Idle (0 peers), best: #0 (0x02ba…032a), finalized #0 (0x02ba…032a), ⬇ 0 ⬆ 0    

[.....]

am I missing anything here?

Answer 1

Substrate contracts node uses instant block seals. You need to send transactions to produce blocks.

The instant seal consensus engine, and its cousin the manual seal consensus engine, are both included in the same sc-consensus-manual-seal crate. Instant seal simply authors a new block whenever a new transaction is available in the queue.