build.md

Installing and Running a Node

1. We need the following packages and tools on our Linux system to download the source code and build it:

   • the version control system git,
   • the gcc C-compiler,
   • C++ support for gcc,
   • developer libraries for the the arbitrary precision library gmp,
   • developer libraries for the compression library zlib,
   • developer libraries for systemd,
   • developer libraries for ncurses,
   • ncurses compatibility libraries,
   • the Haskell build tool cabal,
   • the GHC Haskell compiler.

   If we are using an AWS instance running Amazon Linux AMI 2 (see the AWS walk-through for how to get such an instance up and running) or another CentOS/RHEL based system, we can install these dependencies as follows:

    sudo yum update -y
    sudo yum install git gcc gcc-c++ gmp-devel make tar wget zlib-devel -y
    sudo yum install systemd-devel ncurses-devel ncurses-compat-libs -y
   

   For Debian/Ubuntu use the following instead:

    sudo apt-get update -y
    sudo apt-get -y install build-essential pkg-config libffi-dev libgmp-dev libssl-dev libtinfo-dev libsystemd-dev zlib1g-dev make g++ tmux git jq wget libncursesw5 -y
   

   If you are using a different flavor of Linux, you will need to use the package manager suitable for your platform instead of yum or apt-get, and the names of the packages you need to install might differ.

   We download, unpack, install and update Cabal:

    wget https://downloads.haskell.org/~cabal/cabal-install-3.2.0.0/cabal-install-3.2.0.0-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.xz
    tar -xf cabal-install-3.2.0.0-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.xz
    rm cabal-install-3.2.0.0-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.xz cabal.sig
    mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
    mv cabal ~/.local/bin/
    cabal update
   

   This will work on a fresh AWS instance and assumes that folder ~/.local/bin is in your PATH. On other systems, you must either move the executable to a folder that is in your PATH or modify your PATH by adding the line

    export PATH="~/.local/bin:$PATH"
   

   to your .bashrc-file.

   Above instructions install Cabal version 3.2.0.0. You can check the version by typing

    cabal --version
   

   Finally we download and install GHC:

    wget https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.6.5/ghc-8.6.5-x86_64-deb9-linux.tar.xz
    tar -xf ghc-8.6.5-x86_64-deb9-linux.tar.xz
    rm ghc-8.6.5-x86_64-deb9-linux.tar.xz
    cd ghc-8.6.5
    ./configure
    sudo make install
    cd ..
   

2. To download the source code, we use git:

    git clone https://github.com/input-output-hk/cardano-node.git
   

   This should create a folder cardano-node, then download the latest source code from git into it. After the download has finished, we can check its content by

    ls cardano-node
   

   Note that the content of your cardano-node-folder can slightly differ from this!

3. We change our working directory to the downloaded source code folder:

    cd cardano-node
   

4. For reproducible builds, we should check out a specific release, a specific "tag". For the FF-testnet, we will use tag pioneer, which we can check out as follows:

    git fetch --all --tags
    git checkout tags/pioneer
   

5. Now we build and install the node with cabal, which will take a couple of minutes the first time you do a build. Later builds will be much faster, because everything that does not change will be cached.

    cabal install cardano-node cardano-cli
   

   Note: At the time of writing, there is a bug in the latest version of the software that prevents cabal install from working correctly. As a workaround, you can use cabal build instead:

    cabal build all
    cp -p dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.6.5/cardano-node-1.11.0/x/cardano-node/build/cardano-node/cardano-node ~/.local/bin/
    cp -p dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.6.5/cardano-cli-1.11.0/x/cardano-cli/build/cardano-cli/cardano-cli ~/.local/bin/
   

   The remark about your PATH from above applies here as well: Make sure folder ~/.local/bin is in your path or copy the executables to a folder that is. If you have old versions of cardano-node installed on your system, make sure that the new one will be picked! You can check by typing

    which cardano-node
   
    > ~/.local/bin/cardano-node
   

6. If you ever want to update the code to a newer version, go to the cardano-node directory, pull the latest code with git and rebuild. This will be much faster than the initial build:

    cd cardano-node
    git fetch --all --tags
    git tag
    git checkout tags/<the-tag-you-want>
    cabal install cardano-node cardano-cli
   

   Note that it might be necessary to delete the db-folder (the database-folder) before running an updated version of the node.

7. We can start a node on the Cardano mainnet with

    scripts/mainnet.sh
   

   

Congratulations! You have installed the node, started it and connected it to the Cardano mainnet.