Surfpool

If you're building on Solana and tired of downloading 2TB snapshots just to test against mainnet data, this is your escape hatch. It's a drop-in replacement for solana-test-validator that lazily forks mainnet accounts on demand, boots instantly, and runs on a Raspberry Pi. You get cheatcodes for time travel and balance manipulation, a web dashboard for transaction profiling, and Infrastructure as Code via txtx DSL for reproducible deployments. The 460+ GitHub stars suggest the Solana community has been waiting for something like this. Works with existing tooling like Anchor and solana-cli without configuration changes, which matters when you just want to ship.

skills.sh installs: 220
GitHub stars: 130
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add sendaifun/skills --skill surfpool --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Surfpool - Solana Development Environment

The definitive guide for Surfpool - where developers start their Solana journey. A drop-in replacement for solana-test-validator that enables local program simulation using Mainnet accounts fetched just-in-time.

What is Surfpool?

Surfpool is a comprehensive development environment that combines local-first testing with real Mainnet data access:

Mainnet Forking - Clone accounts, programs, and token balances from Mainnet instantly
Cheatcodes - Special RPC methods for time travel, balance manipulation, and state control
Infrastructure as Code - Reproducible, auditable deployments using txtx DSL
Surfpool Studio - Embedded dashboard with transaction inspection and profiling
Universal Faucet - Get SOL, USDC, USDT, BONK from a single interface

Key Benefits

Feature	Description
Instant Boot	No 2TB snapshots, runs on Raspberry Pi
Lazy Forking	Copy-on-read strategy pulls mainnet data as needed
Full Compatibility	Works with solana-cli, Anchor, wallets, explorers
Zero Config	Auto-detects Anchor projects and deploys programs