[DevP2P](https://github.com/ethereum/devp2p) is a set of network protocols that form the Ethereum peer-to-peer network. The DevP2P specifications define precisely how nodes should find each other and communicate. Geth implements the DevP2P specifications in Go.
Ethereum Node Records can be decoded, verified and displayed to the terminal using `enrdump`. It takes the ENR in its encoded form, which is the base64 encoding of its RLP representation. A decoded human-readable text representation is displayed.
Use `devp2p enrdump <base64>` to verify and display an Ethereum Node Record.
Read more on [Ethereum Node Records](https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/networking-layer/network-addresses/#enr) or browse the [specs](https://github.com/ethereum/devp2p/blob/591edbd36eb57280384d07373a818c00bddf3b31/enr.md).
### Node Key Management
The `devp2p key ...` command family deals with node key files.
Run `devp2p key generate mynode.key` to create a new node key in the `mynode.key` file.
There are several commands for working with JSON node set files. These files are generated by the discovery crawlers and DNS client commands. Node sets also used as the input of the DNS deployer commands.
For example, given a node set in `nodes.json`, you could create a filtered set containing up to 20 eth mainnet nodes which also support snap sync using this command:
The `devp2p discv5 ...` command family deals with the [Node Discovery v5](https://github.com/ethereum/devp2p/tree/master/discv5/discv5.md) protocol. This protocol is currently under active development.
The devp2p command also contains interactive test suites for Discovery v4 and Discovery v5. To run these tests a networking environment must be set up with two separate UDP listening addresses are available on the same machine. The two listening addresses must also be routed such
For example, to run the test on the local host when the node under test is also on the local host, assign two IP addresses (or a larger range) to the loopback interface. On macOS, this can be done by executing the following command:
1. Start the node under test first, ensuring that it won't talk to the Internet (i.e. disable bootstrapping). An easy way to prevent unintended connections to the global DHT is listening on `127.0.0.1`.
The Eth66 test suite is also a conformance test suite for the eth 66 protocol version specifically. To run the eth66 protocol test suite, initialize a Geth node as described above and run the following command, replacing `<enode>` with the enode of the Geth node:
This page introduced the DevP2P stack that defines Ethereum's peer-to-peer network and the `devp2p` command line tool that comes bundled with Geth. The `devp2p` tools enables Geth developers to work on the peer-to-peer network.
