Bitcoin Cloud Infrastructure

Project Purpose

To build a command line tool that will be a foundation for implementing bitcoin node operations on linode. The current feature is creation of a bitcoin-full-node with options to specify which blockchain and volume size.

Requirements

1. You are running a linux distro (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc)
2. Docker is installed with docker daemon running
   • This command will install on Ubuntu: sudo apt install docker.io
3. A linode account has been created (https://login.linode.com/signup)
4. You have a ssh public key as ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
   • If you have no existing public key, you can create one with ssh-keygen and press enter for all questions.

Create environment variables (put into ~/.bashrc)

On the linode Cloud Manager, select "Profile and Account" in the top right corner. Select "API Tokens" then "Create a Personal Access Token" one with the default privileges (only linode instance and volume creation are needed). Copy the API token and place it in the environment variable LINODE_API_TOKEN as below:

export LINODE_CLI_TOKEN="2a2f4563d1......33ca8a32e23"   # Create with linode Cloud Manager 
export LINODE_ROOT_PASSWORD="mypassword" 

Put ssh key onto linode to avoid password prompt

Copy the ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub contents to the linode ssh key section via cloud console. This step will allow the bci tool to execute commands on the remote linode instance without requiring a password.

Development Environment

These are the steps to create a bci development environment

1. Clone this git repo into a directory of your choice.
2. Install make: sudo apt install make

Test that make has been installed correctly

$ make
:
:
:

Test that docker has been installed correctly

$ make test-docker

• The following message should appear:

Hello from Docker!
This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.

Running the bci tool

$ make bci # Might take a few minutes the first time.  It will be very fast subsequently.

Run bci commands (use $bci --help)

Examples:

# bci create DEV    # Create a DEV bitcoin node which runs in a small volume against the 'test' bitcoin blockchain
# bci create PROD    # Create a PROD bitcoin node which runs in a large volume against the 'main' bitcoin blockchain

Note: command line completion is enabled so that you can press the [TAB] key to get a list of valid commands and parameters after the 'bci'

• Example 1: $bci [tab]
• Example 2: $bci c[tab]

Release Process

Every pushed commit will run the github workflow (.github/workflows/build.yml) and run the integration tests. If these integration tests pass the image will be tagged and pushed to Dockerhub.

To apply a tag (eg 1.0) use these steps after a successful build on github:

git tag -m "Annotated comment" x.y master
git push origin x.y

The build will run on github (https://github.com/HarrisKirk/bitcoin-full-node/actions) and will use the git tag to label the image when pushed to Dockerhub.

Runtime Environment

These are the command to launch the bci command line tool directly from the image in docker hub.

$ alias bci="docker container run --rm --name=bci --workdir /opt/devops-bci/bci-app --user : -it -e LINODE_CLI_TOKEN -e LINODE_ROOT_PASSWORD -v /home/$(whoami)/.ssh:/root/.ssh cjtkirk1/bitcoin-linode:latest"
$ bci

Notes

• This bci software tool does not perform any financial transacations. It also does not store or manage any keys. It simply creates a computer in the linode cloud, attaches a volume and installs the bitcoin full node software on it.
• Docker is used to avoid needing to install python, dependent modules and any other dependencies in the future.