Part 3 - Pocket Configuration
1. Download Snapshot
Rather than synchronizing your Pocket node from block zero (which could take weeks), you can use a snapshot.
Instead of synchronizing your node from block zero, which could take weeks, you can use a snapshot. A snapshot of the Pocket blockchain is taken every 12 hours and can be downloaded using the instructions on the Pocket Snapshots Repository page.
The snapshots are updated every 12 hours. Check the last update time of the README.md file in the GitHub repo to know when the last snapshot was taken, and it's best to download one that's just a few hours old.
Downloading a snapshot will likely take a few hours, so we’re going to use the screen
command so that the download can run in the background, allowing you to perform other tasks.
To download the most recent snapshot:
Create a
screen
instance:Press
Enter
to get back to a prompt.Change into the
.pocket
directory.Create a directory named
data
and change into it:Download the latest snapshot using the following command:
While the snapshot is downloading, press Ctrl-A
and then d
to let the process run in the background and be returned to a prompt.
To return to your screen
instance to see how things are going:
You can also check on the status of the download by watching your disk usage:
Once your download is completed, make the pocket
user the owner of the data
directory:
And when you’re done with your screen
instance, you can exit out of it:
2. Create a Pocket wallet account
Pocket nodes work with a Pocket wallet account, which handles sending and receiving transactions from the node. You can make a new account with the Pocket CLI tool we just installed, or use one you already have. We'll make a new account for this guide.
Creating an account
To create an account, run the following command:
You’ll be asked to set a passphrase for the account. You can use any passphrase you like but for security reasons, it’s best to use a passphrase that is at least 12 characters long, preferably longer.
If you already have a Pocket account that you’d like to use to run the node, you can import it here. Upload the JSON file associated with your account to the server and run the following command:
You will be prompted for the decryption passphrase of the file, and then for a new encryption passphrase to store in the keybase.
Listing accounts
After you’ve created the account you can use the pocket accounts list
command to confirm that the account was added successfully.
Setting the validator address
Next, set the account as the one the node will use with the following command:
Confirm the validator address
Finally, you can confirm that the validator address was set correctly by running the following command:
Create config.json
config.json
The Pocket core software uses a config file to store configuration details. By default the config file is located at ~/.pocket/config/config.json
. In this step we’ll look at how to create a new config file.
To create a new config file:
Run the following command, which will create the default
config.json
file, add the seeds, set port 8081 to 8082, and increase the RPC timeout value:
This code above includes a long command! Make sure you’ve copied it completely.
Verify the
config.json
file setting by viewing the contents of the file:
Command Response
3. Create chains.json
chains.json
Pocket nodes relay transactions to other blockchains. So, you’ll need to configure the chains your node can relay to. For this guide, we’ll just be setting up our node to relay to the Pocket mainnet blockchain, essentially through itself.
To maximize your rewards, you’ll want to relay to other chains. We’ll cover that in more detail later but here is a list of other blockchains you could relay to.
Generating a chains.json
file with the CLI
chains.json
file with the CLIYou can use the Pocket CLI to generate a chains.json
file for your node by running the following command:
This will prompt you for the following information:
Enter the ID of the Pocket Network RelayChain ID:
Enter the URL of the local network identifier.
When you’re prompted to add another chain, enter
n
for now.
By default the chains.json
file will be created in ~/.pocket/config
. You can use the --datadir
flag to create the chains.json file in an alternate location. For example: pocket util generate-chains --datadir "/mnt/data/.pocket"
.
4. Create genesis.json
genesis.json
Now that we have a chains.json
file set up, so we can move on to test our node.
When you start a Pocket node for the first time, it will need to find other nodes (peers) to connect with. To do that we use a file named genesis.json
with details about peers the node should connect to get on the network.
To create a JSON file with the genesis information:
Change to the
.pocket/config
directory:Use the following command to get the
genesis.json
file from GitHub:
5. Set open file limits
Ubuntu and other UNIX-like systems have a ulimit
shell command that’s used to set resource limits for users. One of the limits that can be set is the number of open files a user is allowed to have. Pocket nodes will have a lot of files open at times, so we’ll want to increase the default ulimit for the pocket
user account.
Increasing the ulimit
Before increasing the ulimit, you can check the current ulimit with the following command:
Increase the ulimit to 16384. The
-Sn
option is for setting the soft limit on the number of open files:Check the new ulimit to confirm that it was set correctly. The
-n
option is for getting the limit for just the number of open files:
Permanent settings
Using the above method for setting the ulimit
only keeps the change in effect for the current session. To permanently set the ulimit, you can do the following:
Open the
/etc/security/limits.conf
file.Add the following line to the bottom of the file:
Save the file with
Ctrl+O
and thenEnter
.Exit nano with
Ctrl+X
.
After permanently setting the ulimit, the next thing we’ll do is download a snapshot of the Pocket blockchain.
6. Configure systemd
Next, we’ll configure the Pocket service using systemd, a Linux service manager. This will enable the Pocket node to run and restart even when we’re not logged in.
Creating a systemd service in Linux
To setup a systemd service for Pocket, do the following:
Open nano and create a new file called
pocket.service
:Add the following lines to the file:
Make sure the
User
is set to the user that will run the Pocket service.Make sure the
ExecStart
andExecStop
paths are set to the path for the Pocket binary.Save the file with
Ctrl+O
and thenreturn
.Exit nano with
Ctrl+X
.Reload the service files to include the pocket service:
Start the pocket service:
Verify the service is running:
CommandResponse
Stop the pocket service:
Verify the service is stopped:
Set the service to start on boot:
Verify the service is set to start on boot:
CommandResponse
Start the pocket service:
Other systemctl commands
Restart the Pocket service:
Prevent the service from starting on boot:
View mounted volumes:
Viewing the logs
View the logs for the Pocket service:
View just the last 100 lines of the logs (equivalent to the
tail -f
command):
Finding Errors
You can use grep
to find errors in the logs.
In case you skipped the step above while the snapshot was downloading, once your download is completed, make the pocket
user the owner of the data
directory:
And when you’re done with your screen
instance, you can exit out of it:
We are almost done! We now need to setup an HTTP proxy in the next step and we’ll be ready to go live.
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