Listen to anyone talking about Stellar and what sets it apart from other blockchain projects, and path payments will ultimately be touted.

The ability to pay for a cup of coffee using whatever asset you have at hand, and still have the merchant receive their preferred currency. Commerce, cross-border remittances; the uses are many.

Path finding is at the center of this.

To do a path payment you need to supply a path to the network, to get a path you need to ask someone to figure one out for you.

By default, this is one of the responsibilities of a Horizon server.

This is a standalone path finding server that performs path finding without the need to have a Horizon server running.

For the vision to come true of using path payments everyday, for every payment, path finding has to be able to run at interactive rates. You don't want to leave users hanging, waiting around wondering what's going on.

Looking at the current stats, that's exactly what happens now, which is what lead to the development of this project.

• Typescript
  • npm install -g typescript
• A synced stellar-core node
• A PostgreSQL instance w/ a stellar-core database

git clone https://github.com/future-tense/stellar-pathfinder-server.git
cd stellar-pathfinder-server
npm install
npm run build

• STELLAR_CORE_DB
  • PostgreSQL connection string, e.g.
    • postgres://{username}:{password}@{host}/{database}
• API_PORT
  • TCP port to listen to for incoming connections for the API. Default: 8000
• TRIGGER_DELAY
  • How many milliseconds after the last trigger to wait before considering a ledger complete. Default: 5
• LOG_LEVEL
  • NONE, FATAL, ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG, TRACE/ALL. Default: INFO

The REST API is more-or-less compatible with the Horizon API, and could be used as a drop-in replacement.

The differences are

• pathfinder requires the source_account query parameter
• pathfinder ignores the destination_account query parameter
• pathfinder returns fewer results

• add rate limiting

Notes:

1) using the median value of three runs of time curl https://{host}/accounts/GDUMWJ3ISSVBKGZHVQZRVUN6TUOJETXDV7POKVNXEYBCRN4CQOYCV5AA

2) using the median value of three runs of time curl "https://{host}//paths?source_account=GDUMWJ3ISSVBKGZHVQZRVUN6TUOJETXDV7POKVNXEYBCRN4CQOYCV5AA&destination_account=GDUMWJ3ISSVBKGZHVQZRVUN6TUOJETXDV7POKVNXEYBCRN4CQOYCV5AA&destination_asset_type=credit_alphanum4&destination_asset_code=BTC&destination_asset_issuer=GBSTRH4QOTWNSVA6E4HFERETX4ZLSR3CIUBLK7AXYII277PFJC4BBYOG&destination_amount=0.01"