bitcoin-monitor

Bitcoin block explorer, using Django to persist blocks from the bitcoin node (bitcoind) into Postgres, and displaying through a React frontend.

Celery is used for the persist tasks and Channels is used to notify the frontend of new blocks. Redis is used as the persistence store for both.

Docker is used to encapsulate the separate pieces. Nginx is used for the production setup (see docker-compose.prod.yml) and omitted for the dev setup (docker-compose.yml).

Quickstart guide

Setup

• install Docker: Mac | Ubuntu
• clone this repo and the docker-bitcoin repo; make sure they are adjacent directories in the same parent directory
• from the bitcoin-monitor directory, make help will show available make commands

Run Docker

• start the containers:
  • make up (first time this will also build the images)
  • ctrl-c will detach you from the logging output; container will still be running in the background
  • make logs will re-attach you to logging
  • bitcoind logging drowns out the others. So make log name=django will show output only from the django container. Other container names are celery (worker tasks), redis, db (postgres), bitcoind, and in prod setup: nginx, daphne.
• stop the containers:
  • make down
• check everything works:
  • start the containers if they aren't running (make up)
  • make status (should show local blockchain info)
• interactive usage of the python Rpc client:
  • make ipython (will drop you in an ipython shell inside the django container)
  • from jsonrpc.client import RpcClient
client = RpcClient()
block_hash = client.get_best_block_hash()
client.get_block(block_hash)
• direct usage of bitcoind's rpc client, bitcoin-cli:
  • make bash name=bitcoind (will drop you in a bash shell inside the bitcoind container)
  • bitcoin-cli getbestblockhash (should return a hash)
  • bitcoin-cli help (shows more commands)

Persisting blocks into Postgres

To run the Celery tasks that read block data from bitcoind and persist to Postgres (db container), use make process_blockchain. If you attach to the celery logging, you will see the workers processing the block tasks.

Block explorer frontend

For dev setup, just cd frontend and then npm start. Then visit localhost:3000 in your browser. You should see the initial list of blocks and as each celery task completes, the websocket will pick up the block message and prepend to the list.

For prod setup, you should build the static files first:

• cd frontend
• npm run build
• cd ../../
• make bash
• ./manage.py collectstatic

Then visit localhost:80 in your browser.

Quick end?

If you're playing around with this, you will probably want to cleanup at some point; the full Bitcoin blockchain is nearing 300GB currently and the postgres db can get even larger.

After make down, make clear_redis; make nuke_db; make nuke_blockchain; make clean will take care of cleaning out data and extraneous docker thingies.

If you really want to trash everything, don't forget to use docker image ls, docker rmi, etc. to identify and remove the images.

References

• Mastering Bitcoin, chapter 3: intro to bitcoind
• ChainQuery: useful web interface to learn about bitcoin-cli
• Programming Bitcoin: details with working python code for block and transaction serialization