BlockchainNode

A node for the helium blockchain

Local Installation

In order to run locally, a number of dependencies must be met.

(Note: These are required to build and run this node. Releases will be built in the future which require no external dependencies)

Homebrew

For OSX, make sure you have Homebrew installed. We'll use it to install the following dependencies

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Native Dependencies

$ brew install autoconf automake wget yasm gmp libtool cmake clang-format lcov doxygen

Elixir

For OSX,

$ brew install elixir

For Ubuntu, default package manager is woefully out of date so follow elixir-lang.org instructions

$ wget https://packages.erlang-solutions.com/erlang-solutions_1.0_all.deb && sudo dpkg -i erlang-solutions_1.0_all.deb
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install esl-erlang
$ sudo apt-get install elixir

Clone blockchain-node

Clone the blockchain-node project somewhere.

$ git clone git@github.com:helium/blockchain-node.git

Fetch deps

cd into blockchain-node and use mix to fetch the erlang/elixir dependencies.

$ mix deps.get

Build a release

Unless you're doing some development on the node, you'll want to build a prod release.

Building a prod release

cd into the blockchain-node project and then run:

$ make release

Building a dev release

cd into the blockchain-node project and then run:

$ make devrelease

Note: A devrelease is not connected to the seed nodes, you need to have a local blockchain running

Building interactively

cd into the blockchain-node project and then run:

$ make
$ iex -S mix

Start the release

Starting a prod release

In background mode:

$ ./cmd start

In foreground mode:

$ ./cmd foreground

In console mode:

$ ./cmd console

Starting a dev release

In background mode:

$ ./cmd -e dev start

In foreground mode:

$ ./cmd -e dev foreground

In console mode:

$ ./cmd -e dev console

Load the genesis block

Using the onboard genesis block:

$ ./cmd genesis onboard

Using a local genesis block:

$ ./cmd genesis load <full_path_to_genesis_block_file>

Connect to a miner on the blockchain

For prod release:

$ ./cmd peer connect <listen_addr>

Note: a prod release would ideally be connected to the seed nodes since they are pre-configured

For dev release:

$ ./cmd -e dev peer connect <listen_addr>

Installation

If available in Hex, the package can be installed by adding blockchain_node to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:blockchain_node, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Documentation can be generated with ExDoc and published on HexDocs. Once published, the docs can be found at https://hexdocs.pm/blockchain_node.

Using Docker

You can build and run the node in a docker container using the following instructions. IMPORTANT: you will need to copy a private ssh key that has access to helium's private github repos to .ssh/id_rsa. The .ssh/ directory is in .gitignore so the key will remain local to each user.

To Build the container, use: make docker-build.

To start the container, use: make docker-start. Note that this command will fail if you haven't built the container first. This command will use the existing container each time it is run. If the repository is updated, you must re-run make docker-build first.

To stop the container, use; make docker-stop.