Running Test Consensus Nodes

These instructions guide you through the process of setting up and running a test consensus node in both local and Clustered environments.

Local Setup

1. Edit the addresses.txt file located in the root directory of the tools crate. This file contains node addresses in the format IP:PORT. For a single node, use the example file. To run multiple nodes communicating with each other, write each node address on a separate line. This will run one node per address.

2. Move to the project root (era-consensus) and execute the following commands:

   make nodes_config
   

   This command creates a directory named nodes-config and generates a folder for each address listed in the .txt file with the ip as the directory name, providing essential configuration files for the corresponding node.

   make node IP=<NODE_IP>
   

   The default value for this command is set to 127.0.0.1:3054 for launching the initial node, to run a different node just use the IP previously detailed in the addresses.txt file. Note that running this command will take control of the terminal.

Running in minikube

To run a number of nodes locally in minikube, first we need to build the binary:

make docker_build_executor

This command will create the executor binary to be included in a docker image.

Before running the deployment script, ensure minikube is installed and running:

minikube start

Then run

make start_k8s_nodes NODES=<number> SEED_NODES=<number>

Here, NODES is the desired total amount of nodes to run in the k8s cluster (defaults to 4 if omitted), and SEED_NODES is the amount of those nodes to be deployed first as seed nodes (defaults to 1).

This command will:

• Generate the configuration files for each node (this step may change in the future, as we may not need to include configuration files in the images)
• Build a docker image with the configuration files and the binary created in previous step
• Deploy the initial seed nodes
• Obtain the internal IP addresses of the seed nodes
• Deploy the rest of the nodes providing the seed nodes IP addresses to establish the connections

You may run

minikube dashboard

To start the minikube dashboard in order to inspect the deployed pods. Remember to use consensus namespace to find all consensus related infrastructure.

Finally to clean everything up

make clean

This will remove all namespaces, deployments and pods from the minikube environment and the images generated in Docker. If you want to stop the minikube environment just do:

minikube delete --all