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This is the project wiki for Besu. It's a home for contributor guides, project process, and reference material for people working on Besu.

Besu overview

Besu project status:

• Status : Graduated
• OpenSSF Best Practices :
• Community : Discord (#besu, #besu-contributors)
• Documentation : docs.besu-eth.org
• Repositories : besu-eth/besu, besu-eth/besu-docs

Besu is an open source Ethereum client developed under the Apache 2.0 license and written in Java. It runs on public Ethereum networks, private permissioned networks, and test networks.

Core capabilities include:

• Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
• Consensus support, including Proof of Stake and Proof of Authority variants (IBFT 2.0, QBFT)
• User-facing APIs (JSON-RPC over HTTP/WebSocket and GraphQL)
• Plugin architecture for extending Besu behavior
• Monitoring integrations and metrics endpoints

View the Besu documentation to get started with public networks, private networks, plugins, and configuration.

About this wiki

This wiki is maintained from the besu-eth/wiki source repository. Changes are reviewed through pull requests and then published to the rendered Besu wiki. If you spot something to fix or add, open a pull request against the source repo rather than editing the rendered wiki directly. Direct wiki edits are overwritten on the next publish.

Most pages began as a Hyperledger Confluence export and are being ported one topic at a time into clean GitHub wiki pages. The full raw export is preserved on the confluenceExport branch. If a topic you expect is missing, it likely still lives in that backup awaiting a port.

Continuing the wiki migration

To port another page out of the Confluence backup:

1. Clone the source repo besu-eth/wiki and branch off main:

   git switch -c docs/port-<page>

2. Find and pull the page from the backup branch (the export lives under besu/):

   # browse what exists
   git ls-tree -r --name-only confluenceExport -- besu/
   
   # pull a single file onto your branch
   git checkout confluenceExport -- besu/path/to/page.md

3. Move and rename it to a flat, root-level wiki page using Hyphen-Separated-Words.md. The filename becomes the page title (for example, Working-through-Hive-tests.md becomes "Working through Hive tests").

4. Clean up Confluence artifacts: leftover macros, broken lf-hyperledger.atlassian.net links, and "export flag not set" boilerplate.

5. Fix cross-links to use bare page names, for example [Working with DCO](Contributing-Working-with-DCO) (no .md, no leading slash).

6. Surface the page by adding it to _Sidebar.md (and linking from Home where appropriate), then open a PR.

When a ported page links to something not yet migrated, leave an inline <!-- TODO --> marking it.