Ethereum provider

This repository provides an Ansible playbook to install a highly scalable, available and performant Ethereum RPC provider on Debian based linux machines. It comprises multiple load balancers and multiple Nethermind (execution layer) full nodes.

We also provide deployments for Gnosis Chain (previously known as xDai) and Goerli networks. At HOPR we have deployed this playbook into our infrastructure and it is available publicly to anyone at these endpoints:

• https://primary.gnosis-chain.rpc.hoprtech.net
• https://secondary.gnosis-chain.rpc.hoprtech.net
• https://primary.goerli.rpc.hoprtech.net
• https://secondary.goerli.rpc.hoprtech.net

The HOPR protocol is already using these Ethereum provider endpoints and has no dependenecy with other third party providers.

This repo aims at providing a high availability service, and that's why we use an HAProxy to perform the load balancing across multiple Nethermind Ethereum clients that are pre-configured to run the Gnosis Chain network. The frontends defined at HAProxy are configured with SSL.

This repository is shipped with the configuration of Gnosis Chain and Goerli chains but more endpoints could be provided easily by:

• Modifying the nethermind.yaml to invoke an additional hopr.nethermind role by specify other values
• Modifying the haproxy.yaml to add more domain at the list. Be sure that you add as well the specific domain name at the corresponding ./inventories/hosts_vars/primary and ./inventories/hosts_vars/secondary.

Architecture

The below diagram shows the infrastructure example that is deployed for Gnosis Chain:

An equivalent infrastructure has been deployed to Goerli

Public endpoints

Gnosis Chain

curl -H "Origin: http://primary.gnosis-chain.rpc.hoprtech.net" -X POST --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_chainId","params":[],"id":67}' https://primary.gnosis-chain.rpc.hoprtech.net

curl -H "Origin: http://secondary.gnosis-chain.rpc.hoprtech.net" -X POST --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_chainId","params":[],"id":67}' https://secondary.gnosis-chain.rpc.hoprtech.net

Goerli

curl -H "Origin: http://primary.goerli.rpc.hoprtech.net" -X POST --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_chainId","params":[],"id":67}' https://primary.goerli.rpc.hoprtech.net

curl -H "Origin: http://secondary.goerli.rpc.hoprtech.net" -X POST --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"eth_chainId","params":[],"id":67}' https://secondary.goerli.rpc.hoprtech.net

Installation

If you want to create your own instance of Ethereum nodes, you can follow the following steps:

• Create 4 Debian linux machines, they can be bare metal or virtual machines.
• In case you are using a dynamic Ansible inventory, modify the hosts.yaml file to assign the hostnames to the desired groups loadbalancers and nethermind. Some dynamic Ansible inventories use tag machines for grouping, so tagging the machine would be a simpler way.
• In case you are using a static Ansible inventory, create a file called ssh_config at the root of this repo that will have the ssh configuration to connect to the linux machines which you created in the first step. Here is an example of the contents of that file:

  ## Load Balancers
  Host primary
      HostName W.X.Y.Z
      User root
      Port 22
      IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<your_host_private_key>
      StrictHostKeyChecking no
      IdentitiesOnly yes
  
  Host secondary
      HostName W.X.Y.Z
      User root
      Port 22
      IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<your_host_private_key>
      StrictHostKeyChecking no
      IdentitiesOnly yes
  
  # Nethermind nodes
  Host nethermind01
      HostName W.X.Y.Z
      User root
      Port 22
      IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<your_host_private_key>
      StrictHostKeyChecking no
      IdentitiesOnly yes
  
  Host nethermind02
      HostName W.X.Y.Z
      User root
      Port 22
      IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<your_host_private_key>
      StrictHostKeyChecking no
      IdentitiesOnly yes
  

  • Add this line into your ~/.ssh/config file to check that you can connect to them

  Include <full_github_repo_path>/ssh_config
  

  • Check connectivity through

  ssh primary
  ssh secondary
  ssh nethermind01
  ssh nethermind02
  

  • If your hosts have a different name than the example above, specify those names at the inventory file hosts by modifying hosts.yaml
• Install ansible role requirements

    make galaxy

• Execute Ansible playbook for the Ethereum provider

    make install

Requirements

This playbook requires these roles to be installed (via the make galaxy command):

• Ansible docker role
• Ansible nethermind role
• Ansible certbot role
• Ansible haproxy role

Playbook Variables

Variables	Required	Default value	Description
gnosis_domain_name	true	primary.gnosis-chain.rpc.hoprtech.net	DNS name for the gnosis chain. Should be specified as host variable at the inventory to provide different values for each host.
goerli_domain_name	true	primary.goerli.rpc.hoprtech.net	DNS name for the goerli chain. Should be specified as host variable at the inventory to provide different values for each host.
gnosis_backend_port	true	8545	Port used to communicate between HA Proxy and Nethermind for Gnosis
goerli_backend_port	true	8546	Port used to communicate between HA Proxy and Nethermind for Goerli
gnosis_backend_hosts	true	[IP1, IP2]	List of IP of the Nethermind hosts for Gnosis
goerli_backend_hosts	true	[IP1, IP2]	List of IP of the Nethermind hosts for Goerli

These variables are set at the inventory level. Have a look at them here

License

MIT

Author Information

This role was created by HOPR