Manual Installation

If you don't want to use the provided deploy script, you can instead choose to manually roll out your validator deployment.

Setting up a Linera Validator

For the next section, we'll be working out of the docker subdirectory in the linera-protocol repository.

Creating your Validator Configuration

Validators are configured using a TOML file. You can use the following template to set up your own validator configuration:

server_config_path = "server.json"
host = "<your-host>" # e.g. my-subdomain.my-domain.net
port = 19100
metrics_host = "proxy"
metrics_port = 21100
internal_host = "proxy"
internal_port = 20100
[external_protocol]
Grpc = "ClearText" # Depending on your load balancer you may need "Tls" here.
[internal_protocol]
Grpc = "ClearText"

# Adjust depending on the number of shards you have
[[shards]]
host = "docker-shard-1"
port = 19100
metrics_port = 21100

[[shards]]
host = "docker-shard-2"
port = 19100
metrics_port = 21100

[[shards]]
host = "docker-shard-3"
port = 19100
metrics_port = 21100

[[shards]]
host = "docker-shard-4"
port = 19100
metrics_port = 21100

Genesis Configuration

The genesis configuration describes the committee of validators and chains at the point of network creation. It is required for validators to function.

Initially, the genesis configuration for each Testnet will be found in a public bucket managed by the Linera Protocol core team.

An example can be found here:

wget "https://storage.googleapis.com/linera-io-dev-public/testnet-conway/genesis.json"

Creating Your Keys

Now that the validator configuration has been created and the genesis configuration is available, the validator private keys can be generated.

To generate the private keys, the linera-server binary is used:

linera-server generate --validators /path/to/validator/configuration.toml

This will generate a file called server.json with the information required for a validator to operate, including a cryptographic keypair.

The public key will be printed after the command has finished executing, for example:

$ linera-server generate --validators /path/to/validator/configuration.toml
2024-07-01T16:51:32.881519Z  INFO linera_server: Wrote server config server.json
02a580bbda90f0ab10f015422d450b3e873166703af05abd77d8880852a3504e4d,009b2ecc5d39645e81ff01cfe4ceeca5ec207d822762f43b35ef77b2367666a7f8

The public key and account key, in this case beginning with 02a and 009 respectively, must be communicated to the Linera Protocol core team along with the chosen host name for onboarding in the next epoch.

Note: Before being included in the next epoch, validator nodes will receive no traffic from existing users.

Building the Linera Docker image

To build the Linera Docker image, run the following command from the root of the linera-protocol repository:

docker build --build-arg git_commit="$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)" -f docker/Dockerfile . -t linera

This can take several minutes.

Running a Validator Node

Now that the genesis configuration is available at docker/genesis.json and the server configuration is available at docker/server.json, the validator can be started by running from inside the docker directory:

cd docker && docker compose up -d

This will run the Docker Compose deployment in a detached mode. It can take a few minutes for the ScyllaDB image to be downloaded and started.