This Month in Forest - July 2025

[AlexeyKrasnoperov]

This Month in Forest — July 🌲

Welcome to the July edition of This Month in Forest! We are excited to share the latest updates and improvements to the Forest Filecoin client (and more!).

Highlights

• v0.28.0 "Denethor's Folly" released — non‑mandatory but recommended release. Quality of life improvements around archival snapshot operations and a fix for a memory-leak that may have surfaced on long-running nodes.
• FRC‑0108: Filecoin Snapshot Format was merged — the new snapshot format will include F3 finality certificates directly in the CAR snapshot. This will dramatically speed up node bootstrapping and reduce p2p network bandwidth usage. Thanks to @hanabi1224 for leading this proposal! 🎉
• We published a new developer tool: filecoin-requests-builder. It generates real Filecoin and Ethereum JSON‑RPC calls with up‑to‑date parameters from live chain state. This helps us run reproducible benchmarks across different node implementations. Aleksei shared a thread with examples here.
• Did you know? You can run a Forest mainnet bootstrap node with less than 1 GiB of memory based on our fixes and profiling. 😎

Development

RPC conformance testing

After the merge of FRC-0104, we are working on improvements of forest-tool api comparison functionality.
The team introduced structured reporting for forest-tool api compare, allowing machine‑readable reports and multiple output modes (#5778).

Additionally, status messages in test reports now include specific failure reasons, providing more detailed feedback on failed or mixed test results. (#5870).

These changes make it easier to debug API conformance issues in CI pipelines or during development.

Easier operations

Instrumented monitoring stack

You can now spin up Forest together with Grafana dashboards and metrics in a single docker compose up. Perfect for anyone who wants observability out of the box without extra setup. #5816

Snapshot improvements

Archival snapshot providers can now choose what type of snapshot to export using the new forest-tool archive sync-bucket --export-mode option. Want the full set, a lighter version, or just the diff? Now it's one command away. #5805

When exporting snapshots, Forest will now show the average export speed so you know how fast things are moving (and can estimate when it'll be done). #5869

Better insights into on‑chain messages (via Filecoin.StateDecodeParams)

Forest can now decode and display more types of on‑chain data when you query it. This makes it easier for tools (and humans!) to understand what a message is actually doing on the network instead of just seeing a blob of bytes.

Learn more (technical details)

What is StateDecodeParams?
It decodes raw CBOR params of a message into human‑readable JSON using actor schemas.

What changed?

• Added support for the Init actor state (#5757)
• Added support for System actor methods (#5861)

Why it helps
More messages decode cleanly → better visibility in explorers, scripts, and debugging.

Other

As always, see the CHANGELOG for details. Note that it contains primarily client-facing changes, so if you're interested in the nitty-gritty details, you'll need to go through the commit history. 🤓