lighthouse/book/src/interop-cli.md

Interop CLI Overview

The Lighthouse CLI has two primary tasks:

• Resuming an existing database with $ ./beacon_node.
• Creating a new testnet database using $ ./beacon_node testnet.

See Scenarios for methods we've anticipated will be used interop.

Creating a new database

There are several methods for creating a new beacon node database:

• quick: using the (validator_client, genesis_time) tuple.
• recent: as above but genesis_time is set to the start of some recent time window.
• file: loads the genesis file from disk in one of multiple formats.
• bootstrap: a Lighthouse-specific method where we connect to a running node and download it's specification and genesis state via the HTTP API.

See $ ./beacon_node testnet --help for more detail.

Resuming from an existing database

Once a database has been created, it can be resumed by running $ ./beacon_node.

Presently, this command will fail if no existing database is found. You must use the $ ./beacon_node testnet command to create a new database.