Setting up Environment

Prerequisites for Validator & Operator nodes

Stake :

Before reading any further, please make sure that you have:

1. Staked the Minimum CQT Staking requirements on Moonbeam for BSP.

2. You have turned on your Operator Status in the operator dashboard as so:

GLMR :

GLMR is needed to pay for gas on Moonbeam in order to send proofs of block specimens. This costs approximately 5 GLMR per day. This should be held at the same address as the Operator Address.

Install Dependencies

MacOS 12.x (M1/Intel) Installation requirements

Install XCode:

You must also Install brew (for mac m1/intel) with this script.

This installs all the minimum necessary terminal/command-line tools to get started with software development on a mac.

Complete Installation Time: 1-1.5 hrs depending on your machine and network.

Install Git, Golang, Redis.

• Git is used as the source code version control manager across all our repositories.

• Go is the programming language that is used to develop on go-ethereum and bsp patches, the agent given below is also entirely written in Go.

• Redis is our in-memory database, cache and streaming service provider.

Installation steps are given for various types of OS follow the one suits best for you.

MacOS 12.x (M1/Intel)

brew install git go redis

Debian/Ubuntu

wget https://golang.org/dl/go1.19.linux-amd64.tar.gz 
tar -xvf go1.19.linux-amd64.tar.gz 
sudo mv go /usr/local 

echo "" >> ~/.bashrc 
echo 'export GOPATH=$HOME/go' >> ~/.bashrc 
echo 'export GOROOT=/usr/local/go' >> ~/.bashrc 
echo 'export GOBIN=$GOPATH/bin' >> ~/.bashrc 
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin:$GOBIN' >> ~/.bashrc 
echo 'export GO111MODULE=on' >> ~/.bashrc 
source .bashrc

# install redis and git
apt install git redis-server

Fedora

dnf install git golang redis

RHEL/CentOS

Install Git, Golang, Redis

yum install git go-toolset redis

OpenSUSE/SLES

Install Git, Golang, Redis

zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:languages:go/openSUSE_Leap_15.3/devel:languages:go.repo
zypper refresh
zypper install git go redis

After Installing the dependencies mentioned above, Follow these steps to setup the environment.

Let’s now start with Environment Setup before running Node, Here, you need to setup the following;

1. BSP-Geth & Lighthouse

2. IPFS-Pinner Setup

3. BSP-Agent Setup

BSP-Geth & Lighthouse Setup :

git clone https://github.com/covalenthq/bsp-geth.git
cd bsp-geth

make geth

brew services start redis
==Successfully started `redis` (label: homebrew.mxcl.redis)

On Linux:
systemctl start redis

redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379>

./build/bin/geth --mainnet \ --syncmode snap \ --datadir $PATH_TO_GETH_MAINNET_CHAINDATA \ --replication.targets "redis://localhost:6379/?topic=replication" \ --replica.result --replica.specimen \ --log.folder "./logs/"

lighthouse bn \
   --network mainnet \
   --execution-endpoint http://localhost:8551 \
   --execution-jwt $PATH_TO_GETH_MAINNET_CHAINDATA/geth/jwtsecret \
   --checkpoint-sync-url https://mainnet.checkpoint.sigp.io \
   --disable-deposit-contract-sync

./build/bin/geth attach $PATH_TO_GETH_MAINNET_CHAINDATA/geth.ipc

Welcome to the Geth JavaScript console!

instance: Geth/v1.10.17-stable-d1a92cb2/darwin-arm64/go1.17.2
at block: 10487792 (Mon Apr 11 2022 14:01:59 GMT-0700 (PDT))
datadir: /Users/<user>/bsp/rinkeby-chain-data-snap
modules: admin:1.0 clique:1.0 debug:1.0 eth:1.0 miner:1.0 net:1.0 personal:1.0 rpc:1.0 txpool:1.0 web3:1.0

To exit, press ctrl-d or type exit
> eth.syncing
{
   currentBlock: 10487906,
   healedBytecodeBytes: 0,
   healedBytecodes: 0,
   healedTrienodeBytes: 0,
   healedTrienodes: 0,
   healingBytecode: 0,
   healingTrienodes: 0,
   highestBlock: 10499433,
   startingBlock: 10486736,
   syncedAccountBytes: 0,
   syncedAccounts: 0,
   syncedBytecodeBytes: 0,
   syncedBytecodes: 0,
   syncedStorage: 0,
   syncedStorageBytes: 0
}

INFO [04-11|16:35:48.554|core/chain_replication.go:317]             Replication progress                     sessID=1 queued=1 sent=10960 last=0xffc46213ccd3c55b75f73a0bc29c25780eb37f04c9f2b88179e9d0fb889a4151
INFO [04-11|16:36:04.183|core/blockchain_insert.go:75]              Imported new chain segment               blocks=1       txs=63         mgas=13.147  elapsed=252.747ms    mgasps=52.015   number=10,486,732 hash=8b57c8..bd5c79 dirty=255.49MiB
INFO [04-11|16:36:04.189|core/block_replica.go:41]                  Creating Block Specimen                  Exported block=10,486,732 hash=0x8b57c8606d74972c59c56f7fe672a30ed6546fc8169b6a2504abb633aebd5c79
INFO [04-11|16:36:04.189|core/rawdb/chain_iterator.go:338]          Unindexed transactions                   blocks=1       txs=9          tail=8,136,733 elapsed="369.12µs"

This can take a few days or a few hours depending on if the source chaindata is already available at the datadir location or live sync is being attempted from scratch for a new copy of blockchain data obtained from syncing with peers. In the case of the latter the strength of the network and other factors that affect the Ethereum network devp2p protocol performance can further cause delays. Once blockchain data state sync is complete and eth.syncing returns false. You can expect to see block-specimens in the redis stream. The following logs are captured from bsp-geth service as the node begins to export live Block Specimens.

The last two logs show that new block replicas containing the block specimens are being produced and streamed to the redis topic replication. After this you can check that redis is stacking up the bsp messages through the redis-cli with the command below (this should give you the number of messages from the stream)

$ redis-cli
127.0.0.1:6379>  xlen replication
11696

If it doesn’t - the BSP producer isn't producing messages! In this case please look at the logs above and see if you have any WARN / DEBUG logs that can be responsible for the disoperation. For quick development iteration and faster network sync - enable a new node key to quickly re-sync with the ethereum network for development and testing by going to the root of go-ethereum and running the bootnode helper.

NOTE: To use the bootnode binary execute make all in place of make geth, this creates all the additional helper binaries that bsp-geth ships with.

./build/bin/bootnode -genkey ~/.ethereum/bsp/geth/nodekey

IPFS-Pinner Setup

IPFS-Pinner serves as the interface to the storage layer of the network. It's a custom IPFS node with pinning service support for web3.storage and pinata for content archive manipulation etc.
It is meant for uploading/fetching network artifacts (like block specimens and block results or any other processed block data) files of the Covalent Decentralized Network.

$ cd ..
$ git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.1.13 https://github.com/covalenthq/ipfs-pinner.git ## update if newer release is available
$ cd ipfs-pinner
$ make clean server-dbg

$ cat .envrc
export AGENT_KEY="<<ASK_ON_DISCORD>>"
export DELEGATION_PROOF_FILE_PATH="<< ASK_ON_DISCORD>>"

$ ./build/bin/server -w3-agent-key <AGENT_KEY> -w3-delegation-file <DELEGATION_PROOF_FILE_PATH>

BSP-Agent Setup:

Install Dependencies

• Install direnv

MacOS 12.x (M1/Intel)

Bash

brew install direnv

Debian/Ubuntu

Bash

apt install direnv

Fedora

Bash

dnf install direnv

RHEL/CentOS

Bash

yum install direnv

SLES/OpenSUSE

Bash

zypper install direnv

direnv manages and controls sensitive information for the agent, such as Ethereum private keys for operator accounts on the Covalent Network and Redis access passwords. This is crucial since these applications, exposed on HTTP ports, must not log sensitive data.

To enable direnv on your machine add these to your ~./bash_profile or ~./zshrc depending on which you use as your default shell after installing it using brew.

For bash users - add the following line to your ~/.bashrc

Bash

eval "$(direnv hook bash)"

zsh users - add the following line to your ~/.zshrc

Bash

eval "$(direnv hook zsh)"

After adding this line do not forget to source your bash / powershell config with the following, by running it in your terminal.

Bash

source ~/.zshrc

source ~/.bashrc