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Quick start

This guide will explore the basics of creating a Forta detection bot.

Prerequisites

Before you start, please make sure you have the following:

Initializing a project

To initialize a Forta detection bot, you can use the Forta Hardhat plugin, the Forta Detection Bot Wizard or the forta-bot tool:

$ mkdir my-new-bot
$ cd my-new-bot
$ npx @fortanetwork/forta-bot-cli@latest init

The above snippet creates a new project directory called my-new-bot, and then uses npx (a package runner tool that is part of npm 5.2+) to invoke the init command of the forta-bot tool. By default, the tool will initialize a Typescript project but you can also pass the --javascript or --python options to initialize Javascript or Python projects, respectively.

Using @latest version

We recommend always initializing projects with @latest version to ensure you have the latest and greatest CLI and SDK features. Otherwise, you may end up using an older previously cached version.

The init command will initialize a forta.config.json and a keyfile for you in the ~/.forta folder (you will be prompted for a password for the keyfile). The forta.config.json file will be used throughout the development lifecycle of your bots. Several files will also be created inside of your project folder, including a package.json file, tsconfig.json (for Typescript) and a src folder. Dependencies of the project will also be installed for you by running npm install.

Protecting your keyfile

Make sure you do not forget the password for your keyfile as we have no way to recover it! We also recommend keeping a backup of it. The keyfile is located in the ~/.forta folder and named in the format UTC--<created_at UTC ISO8601>--<address hex> (an example name would be UTC--2021-07-12T01:37:55.270Z--577022b59d1c25623ac523fe78d2f6347b5c69f2). This keyfile will primarily be used for publishing your bot. You can get the absolute path to your keyfile using the npm run keyfile command from the project folder.

Awesome! You have successfully completed setting up your project. See below for ideas/examples of bots, or continue to testing your bot.

Ideas for bots

We’re excited to see what sort of innovative bots the community comes up with! A good place to start is to choose a specific protocol that you use or would love to build bots for. You could also choose based on TVL ranking as listed on DeFi Pulse. If you’re looking for some inspiration to get started, here are possible ideas for bots:

  • Detect admin functions
  • Detect high gas transactions
  • Detect ownership transfers of contracts
  • Detect high volume of failed transactions from an account
  • Detect flash loan attacks
  • Detect sandwich attacks
  • Detect when an oracle is returning bad values
  • Detect transactions from a known list of blacklisted addresses

Be sure to check out useful libraries for developing your bots, including a set of low-code templates you can use. To learn more about what makes a good bot, see our FAQ section.

Examples

You can find some example implementations of Forta bots in our examples repo. Another great place to see real bots in action is on the Forta App Discover page.