Sidekick Overview & Setup
Sequence Sidekick provides a fully equipped backend, leveraging Sequence’s infrastructure to read and write to the blockchain through a simple API.
Main Features 🚀
Effortless setup
Either use our public docker image or start it in dev mode with minimal configuration.
Flexible wallet options
Use a Sequence Smart Wallet with locally managed private keys or securely integrate AWS/GCP KMS for enhanced security.
Webhook management
Leverage our high-performance indexer to build and setup your own custom webhooks through the performant Sequence Indexer.
Tenderly integration
Leverage Tenderly to easily debug your transactions, you get a simulation URL for every transaction executed through Sidekick.
Automatic contract verification
Verifying contracts is cumbersome. Sidekick does it for you for every contract deployed.
Integrated with Sequence Builder
Already have a Sequence Builder project? Import all your contracts data into Sidekick with a single API call.
Built-in Bull MQ Dashboard
Create, monitor and manage your background jobs.
Swagger UI
Explore the API documentation and test the endpoints with the Swagger UI
Optimized transaction execution
Transactions are submitted at optimal gas prices, with automatic resubmission if not included in the mempool within three blocks.
Analytics and monitoring
Sidekick comes integrated with Grafana, Prometheus and Blackbox Exporter to monitor your backend health.
About the backend wallet
Sidekick creates a Sequence Smart Contract Wallet based on the BACKEND_WALLET_PV_KEY or AWS / GCP KMS signer you provide, this allows gas-sponsorship, batching and other optimizations.
To configure the backend wallet, you can:
- Declare your BACKEND_WALLET_PV_KEY in the .env file for a local setup (not recommended for production) or don’t provide it and get a random one generated for you, you can find it in the auto generated
dev.keyfile. - Use the recommended method: setting up AWS or GCP KMS and adding the necessary credentials in the .env file.
To find out what are the required credentials for local, AWS, or GCP wallet configurations, please refer to the env.example file.
Make sure you choose the correct key types in AWS KMS and GCP KMS.
- AWS KMS:
ECC_NIST_P256_KEY_ALIAS - GCP KMS:
GCP_KEY_RING_NAME
Sidekick is built to integrate seamlessly with AWS and GCP KMS, allowing you to use your KMS signer. We’ve developed adapters that make AWS/GCP KMS compatible with the ethers signer type, ensuring compatibility with the latest version.
Sequence Sidekick empowers developers with a scalable, plug-and-play backend solution for blockchain-based applications, allowing you to focus on building without backend complexities.
Start with Docker from CLI
There is a public docker image available on GitHub Container Registry.
This should get you started with a local Sidekick backend running on port 7500 with the minimal features.
We recommend setting SEQUENCE_PROJECT_ACCESS_KEY as well but for testing purposes we provide a default one, you can get yours from Sequence Builder.
Start Sidekick in dev mode
Clone the Sidekick repository
Setup the required environment variables
Required Environment Variables
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| PROJECT_ACCESS_KEY | Access key from Sequence Builder API Keys |
Optional Environment Variables
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| BACKEND_WALLET_PV_KEY | Private key for the EOA used to sign transactions |
| PORT | Port for the Sidekick server (default: 7500) |
| HOST | Host address for the server (default: 0.0.0.0) |
| REDIS_HOST | Redis server host (default: localhost) |
| REDIS_PORT | Redis server port (default: 6379) |
| REDIS_PASSWORD | Password for Redis server (optional) |
| DATABASE_URL | PostgreSQL connection string for Sidekick database |
| SIDEKICK_API_SECRET_KEY | Secret key required for write access to the Sidekick API |
| ETHERSCAN_API_KEY | API key for Etherscan to enable contract verification |
| VERIFY_CONTRACT_ON_DEPLOY | Enable automatic contract verification on deployment (set to true to enable) |
| DEBUG | Enable debug logging (set to true for verbose output) |
| SIGNER_TYPE | Type of signer to use (local, aws_kms, google_kms) |
| AWS_REGION | AWS account region |
| AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID | AWS access key ID |
| AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY | AWS secret access key |
| AWS_KMS_KEY_ID | ID of the KMS key to use |
| PROJECT | GCP project name |
| LOCATION | GCP project location |
| KEY_RING | Key ring name |
| CRYPTO_KEY | Crypto key name |
| CRYPTO_KEY_VERSION | Crypto key version |
Wallet Configuration Variables
Choose one of the following configurations:
For local wallet:
| Variable | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| SIGNER_TYPE | local | |
| BACKEND_WALLET_PV_KEY | 0x… | (optional) |
For AWS KMS:
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| SIGNER_TYPE | aws_kms |
| AWS_REGION | AWS account region |
| AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID | AWS access key ID |
| AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY | AWS secret access key |
| AWS_KMS_KEY_ID | ID of the KMS key to use |
For GCP KMS:
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| SIGNER_TYPE | google_kms |
| PROJECT | GCP project name |
| LOCATION | GCP project location |
| KEY_RING | Key ring name |
| CRYPTO_KEY | Crypto key name |
| CRYPTO_KEY_VERSION | Crypto key version |
Make sure you have Docker installed
Get it from here
Start Sidekick in a Docker container
Check your backend wallet address
Dev mode without Docker
If you want to make changes to the codebase and test them without Docker
This will run Sidekick and also start a Redis server.
Gas Sponsorship
On testnet, we sponsor all the transactions. However, on mainnet - you will want to ensure that you sponsor the transactions in order to ensure that they process correctly by sponsoring the contract itself. You can take a deeper look at our Gas Sponsorship solution to learn how to do this.