Canton Console

The Canton Console panel gives you a live, interactive Canton console attached to a participant node, from the UI, without cluster or shell access.

This is full administrative access to the participant node. A Canton console session can read any party's data, change topology, and alter ledger state. It is the most privileged surface in the platform, and there is no read-only mode and no confirmation on anything you type.

Restrict who can obtain a console token in your identity provider, and treat access to the CatalyX UI as equivalent to participant administrator access.

Where to find it

The panel sits on the Dashboard, directly below the summary cards. It is the only place in the UI where it appears — there is no separate page and no per-validator console.

It starts collapsed. Click the bar labelled Canton Console to expand it; the terminal and its connection are created the first time you do.

Using the Canton Console

Once expanded, a status indicator appears beside the title:

Status	Meaning
idle	Not connected
connected	Session established
error	The connection failed

Type commands directly into the terminal, exactly as you would in a Canton console attached to the node. Output is streamed back live. The terminal keeps 5,000 lines of scrollback.

Reconnect clears the terminal and opens a fresh session — useful if the connection has dropped or the session has become unresponsive.

Two messages come from the console itself rather than from Canton:

Message	Meaning
[Connection error]	The connection could not be established or was lost
[Disconnected: <code>]	The session closed unexpectedly, with the close code

What to use it for

The console exists to cover what the graphical UI deliberately does not:

Task	Why here
Topology inspection and changes	Beyond the read-only views and the external-party flows on the Parties tab.
Diagnostics	health.status and similar commands, when the Participant tab does not give enough detail.
One-off administrative operations	Anything Canton supports that has no CatalyX equivalent.

Canton console command reference

The commands themselves — what you type into the terminal — are Canton's, not CatalyX's, so they are documented upstream rather than duplicated here.

See the official Canton Network documentation for the full Canton console command reference — the admin console commands for participant, mediator, sequencer, and topology nodes.

Session behaviour

Collapsing does not disconnect. The panel hides the terminal but keeps the session alive, so you can collapse it, navigate around the UI, and come back to the same session with its history intact.

Sessions are per user and reused. Reconnecting typically reattaches you to your existing session rather than starting a new one, and recent output is replayed.

Idle sessions are reclaimed after roughly ten minutes with nothing attached.

The session attaches to a running participant pod. If no participant pod is running, the console reports that instead of connecting — check the validator's Summary tab first.

Security notes for operators

Two properties of the current implementation are worth knowing when you assess this feature:

• The session's access token is passed in the connection URL. It may therefore be recorded in proxy and load-balancer access logs. Review your log retention accordingly.

• The token is validated once, when the session is established. An attached session is not re-checked afterwards, so it can outlive the token's expiry. Sessions are reclaimed on idle timeout rather than on token expiry.

If either is unacceptable in your environment, block the console's WebSocket path at your ingress and use a Canton console attached out-of-band instead.