Explore zombienet integration

[svyatonik]

It looks cool what Adrian has introduced for BEEFY (paritytech/polkadot#5840). Would it make sense for us to make some zombienet tests?

Main directions are:

• whether we may use it in our CI pipeline for some basic tests? how long would it take to spin it up and make finality+message delivery?;
• whether we may use it in Cumulus/Polkadot pipeline (or for standalone tests) for some basic tests of R<>W or P<>K bridges? same questions.

[EmmanuellNorbertTulbure]

@bkontur is this similar to what you have implemented, right?

[bkontur]

partially, I use zombienet for local run,
but we would/should add some integration tests to CI (Cumulus) or manual run with asset transfer (statemine/t),
so we will come back to this issue later

[EmmanuellNorbertTulbure]

@serban300 to take a look.

[serban300]

I researched this issue a bit. It seems that cumulus uses zndsl zombienet tests:

• zombienet pipeline
• zombienet tests

The problem is that zndsl allows to start only one network. Looking on the zombienet code, I think it could be extended to start multiple networks. Created an issue for this in order to get feedback from the zombienet mainteainers: paritytech/zombienet#788

[serban300]

Also opened a draft PR in zombienet that adds support for multiple networks in zndsl tests: paritytech/zombienet#792

Might be missing some corner cases and might need some polishing, but overall adding support for multiple networks seems possible.

[serban300]

Covered corner cases and polished the code. The zombienet PR for adding multiple networks support is ready for review: paritytech/zombienet#788 . Waiting on it.

[serban300]

The zombienet team decided that it would be better to support this use case with a different cli tool that they will be working on. Some details here: paritytech/zombienet#796 (comment)

We'll wait for the new tool

[bkontur]

ok, only one zombienet could totally simplify local run, but lets wait for a new tool,
and also there is a new test feature coming soon "xcm-emulator", which could be useful for testing bridge-hub with several runtimes: #2421

[svyatonik]

I'll try to play with zombienet tests here (in this repo). We may then (try to) migrate those tests to polkadot-sdk

[svyatonik]

I'm gonna close it - we now have a basic test (unfortunately with a hacky test runner) in polkadot-sdk CI. If zombienet will ever have a native support for multiple relay chains, we can continue work in a separate issue.