Proposal: Canton Upgrade Readiness Checker

Development Fund Proposal Submission

Proposal file: /proposals/canton-upgrade-readiness-checker.md

Tech and Ops Committee Champion: Seeking a Champion

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Summary

Canton Upgrade Readiness Checker is an open-source CLI designed to validate whether validator and application deployment artifacts are ready for a Canton or Daml 3 upgrade. It scans configurations (HOCON, JSON, YAML, TOML), manifests, and topology-related inputs against a declarative rules engine, enabling teams to identify breaking changes, deprecations, and misconfigurations before production deployment. The tool follows a Rust-first CLI approach with YAML-defined rules that can be extended by the community as CIPs and upgrade guidelines evolve. It generates human-readable reports along with JSON outputs for CI integrations such as GitHub Actions and GitLab, allowing teams to block merges based on critical findings.

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Checklist

✔️ Proposal file added under /proposals/ ✔️ Milestones and funding amounts defined ✔️ Acceptance criteria included ✔️ Alignment with Canton priorities described

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Notes for Reviewers

This proposal focuses on building shared operational tooling for validators and application teams to streamline upgrade readiness, particularly during LSU-style and Daml 3 upgrade coordination. It is not a protocol-level change but an ecosystem support tool aimed at reducing upgrade risks and failures. The design emphasizes extensibility through a declarative rules engine, allowing ongoing updates aligned with Canton releases and evolving best practices. The CLI is intentionally scoped as offline and read-only for v1 to minimize risk, with potential expansion into runtime or admin API validation based on committee feedback. The team welcomes input on scope refinement, rule ownership models, milestone adjustments, and whether runtime validation should be included in future phases.