System Requirements: A dedicated server or virtual machine with a minimum of 64GB of RAM, and at least 350GB of fast local SSD storage. STEEM is one of the most active blockchains in the world and handles an incredibly large amount of transactions per second, as such, it requires fast storage to run efficiently.
With the right equipment and technical configuration a reindex should take no longer than 72 hours. If recommendations are not followed precisely, the reindex can drag on for days or even weeks with significant slowdowns towards the end.
Physically attached SSD will ensure an optimal reindex time. SSD over a NAS or some kind of network storage backed by SSD will often have much higher latency. As an example, AWS EBS is not performant enough. A good recommended instance in AWS is the i3.2xlarge, it comes with a physically attached nVME drive (it must be formatted and mounted on instance launch).
You can save a lot of time by replaying from a block_log. Steemit hosts a public block_log that is regularly updated. Using the docker method below, we have made it easy to download a block_log at launch and replay from it by passing in the USE_PUBLIC_BLOCKLOG=1 environment variable. To do this, make sure your data directory is empty and does not contain a block_log. If you are not using docker, you can download a block_log from here, put it in your steem data directory, and use the --replay-blockchain command line option. Be sure to remove the option if you have to stop/restart steemd after already being synced.
We recommend using docker to both build and run STEEM for exchanges. Docker is the world's leading containerization platform and using it guarantees that your build and run environment is identical to what our developers use. You can still build from source and you can keep both blockchain data and wallet data outside of the docker container. The instructions below will show you how to do this in just a few easy steps.
On Ubuntu 16.04+:
apt-get update && apt-get install git docker.io -y
On other distributions you can install docker with the native package manager or with the script from get.docker.com:
curl -fsSL get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sh get-docker.sh
Pull in the steem repo from the official source on github and then change into the directory that's created for it.
git clone https://github.com/steemit/steem
cd steem
Docker isn't just for downloading already built images, it can be used to build from source the same way you would otherwise build. By doing this you ensure that your build environment is identical to what we use to develop the software. Use the below command to start the build:
docker build -t=steemit/steem .
Don't forget the . at the end of the line which indicates the build target is in the current directory.
This will build everything including running our full suite of tests during the build process. It will anywhere from thirty minutes to a couple hours depending on how fast your equipment is.
When the build completes you will see a message indicating that it is 'successfully built'.
If you'd like to use our already pre-built official binary images, it's as simple as downloading it from the Dockerhub registry with only one command:
docker pull steemit/steem
If you build with Docker but do not want to run steemd from within a docker container, you can stop here with this step and instead extract the binary from the container with the commands below. If you are going to run steemd with docker (recommended method), skip this step altogether. We're simply providing an option for everyone's use-case. Our binaries are built mostly static, only dynamically linking to linux kernel libraries. We have tested and confirmed binaries built in Docker work on Ubuntu and Fedora and will likely work on many other Linux distrubutions. Building the image yourself or pulling one of our pre-built images both work.
To extract the binary you need to start a container and then copy the file from it.
docker run -d --name steemd-exchange steemit/steem
docker cp steemd-exchange:/usr/local/steemd-default/bin/steemd /local/path/to/steemd
docker cp steemd-exchange:/usr/local/steemd-default/bin/cli_wallet /local/path/to/cli_wallet
docker stop steemd-exchange
For your convenience, we have provided a provided an example_config that we expect should be sufficient to run your exchange node. Be sure to rename it to simply config.ini. Be sure to set the account name of your wallet account that you would like to track account history for in the config file. It is defined as account-history-track-account-range = ["accountname","accountname"].
If you are using our docker image and have a need for using a custom config file, instead use config-for-docker.ini. You can place this outside of your container and map to it by adding this argument to your docker run command: -v /path/to/config.ini:/etc/steemd/config.ini. In most cases, a custom configuration file is not necessary.
If you need to track all account history instead of just a single account, this would add quite a bit of overhead and lead to a much longer reindex. If you absolutely need this, we recommend instead using the account_history_rocksdb plugin instead, however, there is one caveat: the rocksdb plugin does not allow the ability to query by transaction ID. For either account_history or account_history_rocksdb you would also add the account_history_api plugin in order to be able to query data. To use these, you would add them to a custom config file.
For re-usability, you can create directories to store blockchain and wallet data and easily link them inside your docker container.
mkdir blockchain
mkdir steemwallet
The below command will start a daemonized instance opening ports for p2p and RPC while linking the directories we created for blockchain and wallet data inside the container. Fill in TRACK_ACCOUNT with the name of your exchange account that you want to follow. The -v flags are how you map directories outside of the container to the inside, you list the path to the directories you created earlier before the : for each -v flag. The restart policy ensures that the container will automatically restart even if your system is restarted.
docker run -d --name steemd-exchange --env TRACK_ACCOUNT=nameofaccount --env USE_PUBLIC_BLOCKLOG=1 -p 2001:2001 -p 8090:8090 -v /path/to/steemwallet:/var/steemwallet -v /path/to/blockchain:/var/lib/steemd/blockchain --restart always steemit/steem
You can see that the container is running with the docker ps command.
To follow along with the logs, use docker logs -f.
Initial syncing will take between 6 and 72 hours depending on your equipment, faster storage devices will take less time and be more efficient. Subsequent restarts will not take as long.
The command below will run the cli_wallet from inside the running container while mapping the wallet.json to the directory you created for it on the host.
docker exec -it steemd-exchange /usr/local/steemd-default/bin/cli_wallet -w /var/steemwallet/wallet.json
For upgrades that require a full replay, we highly recommend performing the upgrade on a separate server in order to minimize downtime of your wallet. When the replay is complete, switch to the server running the newer version of Steem. If for some reason it is absolutely not possible to perform the upgrade on a separate server, you would use the following instructions instead:
Stop the docker container, remove the existing container, clear out your blockchain data directory completely, pull in the latest docker image (or build the image from scratch), and then start a new container using the same command that you previously launched with.
docker stop steemd-exchange
docker rm steemd-exchange
rm -rf blockchain/*
docker pull steemit/steem
docker run -d --name steemd-exchange --env TRACK_ACCOUNT=nameofaccount --env USE_PUBLIC_BLOCKLOG=1 -p 2001:2001 -p 8090:8090 -v /path/to/steemwallet:/var/steemwallet -v /path/to/blockchain:/var/lib/steemd/blockchain --restart always steemit/steem
For upgrades that do not require a full replay, you would use the following instructions: stop the docker container, remove the existing container, pull in the latest docker image (or build the image from scratch), and then start a new container using the same command that you previously launched with:
docker stop steemd-exchange
docker rm steemd-exchange
docker pull steemit/steem
docker run -d --name steemd-exchange --env TRACK_ACCOUNT=nameofaccount --env USE_PUBLIC_BLOCKLOG=1 -p 2001:2001 -p 8090:8090 -v /path/to/steemwallet:/var/steemwallet -v /path/to/blockchain:/var/lib/steemd/blockchain --restart always steemit/steem