Using agents storage function

Introduction

In this guide, we want to illustrate how storage functions are called and how to use them. We want to create an agent which gets a value from the storage (starting from 0) every second. Then prints it, and puts the new value back into the storage but increased by 1 unit.

Walk-through

1. To start let's create a Python script and name it storage.py, we can do this in terminal with touch storage.py.

2. Then, we need to open the script in the text editor of choice and import the necessary classes, Agent and Context, from the uagents library.

3. Let's then create an agent named alice which logs a message every second using the .on_interval() decorator, indicating the current count. The on_interval() function takes a Context object as a parameter: the Context object contains a storage attribute, which is used to store and retrieve data between method calls:

   storage.py

   from uagents import Agent, Context
    
   alice = Agent(name="alice", seed="alice recovery phrase")
    
   @alice.on_interval(period=1.0)
   async def on_interval(ctx: Context):
       current_count = ctx.storage.get("count") or 0
    
       ctx.logger.info(f"My count is: {current_count}")
    
       ctx.storage.set("count", current_count + 1)
    
   if __name__ == "__main__":
       alice.run()

   Here, the on_interval() function retrieves the current count from the storage attribute using the ctx.storage.get() method. It prints the current_count value, and then increments it by 1, and stores the updated count back to the storage attribute using the ctx.storage.set() method. The current count is then logged using the ctx.logger.info() method.

4. Save the script.

Run the script

On your terminal, make sure you activated the virtual environment.

Run the script: python storage.py

The output should look as follows:

[alice]: My count is: 1
[alice]: My count is: 2
[alice]: My count is: 3
...