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Running a validator node locally

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Guilherme Dantas edited this page Jun 16, 2025 · 21 revisions

Prerequisites

  • A Unix-based system (like Linux, macOS, or WSL)
  • A wallet with some Ether for submitting transactions
  • An Ethereum JSON-RPC provider (either self-hosted or third-party)

Important

We advise validators not to use Alchemy's free-tier account because of their block-range limit on eth_getLogs calls. Instead, we suggest either Infura's free-tier account or subscribing to Alchemy's pay-as-you-go model, both of which have been proven more reliable. Other third-party providers are also available.

Docker setup (recommended)

Running the Cartesi Rollups PRT Node inside a Dockered environment is our recommended option for several reasons:

  • Isolation: Your host environment is protected against any unintended behavior
  • Control: You can adjust the amount of memory and disk space used by the node
  • Reproducibility: Your node is expected to behave similar to other nodes validating Honeypot

Enderson Maia, a Cartesi core contributor, was kind enough to create a gist going through the process of setting up a Dockered environment. It encompasses both x86-64 and arm64 architectures, and checksums every binary distributed through GitHub.

Local setup

  1. Create a directory to store the Cartesi Rollups PRT Node and its state.
mkdir -p cartesi-honeypot
cd cartesi-honeypot
mkdir -p bin machine snapshots state
  1. Install the Cartesi Rollups PRT Node.
VERSION='v1.0.0'
ARCH=$(uname -m | sed 's/^aarch64$/arm64/')
FILENAME="cartesi-rollups-prt-node-Linux-gnu-$ARCH.tar.gz"
DOWNLOAD_PREFIX='https://github.com/cartesi/dave/releases/download'
wget -qO- "$DOWNLOAD_PREFIX/$VERSION/$FILENAME" | tar -C bin -xz cartesi-rollups-prt-node
  1. Download the Honeypot machine snapshot. The following code downloads the snapshot used in the Sepolia deployment. For the Mainnet deployment, set the NETWORK variable to mainnet.
VERSION='v2.0.0'
NETWORK='sepolia'
FILENAME="honeypot-snapshot-$NETWORK.tar.gz"
DOWNLOAD_PREFIX='https://github.com/cartesi/honeypot/releases/download'
wget -qO- "$DOWNLOAD_PREFIX/$VERSION/$FILENAME" | tar -C machine -xz
  1. Define the Ethereum JSON-RPC URL to be used by the node to communicate with the blockchain.
export WEB3_RPC_URL="https://sepolia.infura.io/v3/$API_KEY"
  1. Define the application contract address, which you can find in the Deployments page.
export APP_ADDRESS='0xccEbaA7E541BcaA99dE39ca248f0aa6CD33f9e3E'
  1. Define the following environment variables.
export WEB3_CHAIN_ID=$(cast chain-id --rpc-url "$WEB3_RPC_URL")
export MACHINE_PATH=$(pwd)/machine
export STATE_DIR=$(pwd)/state

  1. Now, let's define how the node is going to sign transactions to the blockchain. The node currently supports private keys and AWS KMS.

  2. For private-key wallets, you can provide it through an environment variable. Then, run the node executable with argument pk.

export WEB3_PRIVATE_KEY='0xac0974bec39a17e36ba4a6b4d238ff944bacb478cbed5efcae784d7bf4f2ff80'
./bin/cartesi-rollups-prt-node pk
  1. For AWS KMS wallets, you can define the following environment variables and provide the positional argument awk-kms to the node executable.
export AWS_KMS_KEY_ID=
export AWS_KMS_KEY_ID_FILE=
export AWS_ENDPOINT_URL=
export AWS_REGION=
./bin/cartesi-rollups-prt-node aws-kms

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