I read that you can use the cleos command without having nodeos synced. How does one do this?

Question

I read somewhere you can use the command line cleos without having to sync or even turn on nodeos.

Which means avoiding the need to download 60+gb of blockchain data.

What are some of the limitations if one doesn't download the entire eos blockchain with nodeos? And where does one find a list of producers one can connect to?

Answer 1

You can use cleos and pass as --url parameter a prodcer API endpoint instead of your localhost.

You can have a look here. https://www.eosdocs.io/resources/apiendpoints/

There is also a site specifically providing these services for free (as of time writing) https://dfuse.io/

example:

root@6cd7b4909963:/opt/eosio/bin# cleos --url https://api.eosnewyork.io get info

{ "server_version": "1e9ca55c",
"chain_id": "aca376f206b8fc25a6ed44dbdc66547c36c6c33e3a119ffbeaef943642f0e906",
"head_block_num": 23317888, "last_irreversible_block_num": 23317552, "last_irreversible_block_id": "0163cc30ca0fdfbc7d13ce126cc78e124d6673f6b6f8e625d42dc283745fffef",
"head_block_id": "0163cd80788dac25b0e9f9c4e41836960fb49356f95130d37a4477b1ddac6e6c",
"head_block_time": "2018-10-24T18:01:29.500", "head_block_producer": "eosswedenorg", "virtual_block_cpu_limit": 87353288,
"virtual_block_net_limit": 1048576000, "block_cpu_limit": 128460,
"block_net_limit": 1036696, "server_version_string": "v1.3.2" }