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Install cardano-node

Prerequisites#

Check the cardano-node latest release and set up your platform:

You will need:

  • An x86 host (AMD or Intel), Virtual Machine or AWS instance with at least 2 cores, 4GB of RAM and at least 10GB of free disk space;
  • A recent version of Linux, not Windows or MacOS – this will help us isolate any issues that arise.
  • Make sure you are on a network that is not firewalled. In particular, we will be using TCP/IP port 3000 and 3001 by default to establish connections with other nodes, so this will need to be open.

Install dependencies#

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 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 -ysudo yum install git gcc gcc-c++ tmux gmp-devel make tar wget -ysudo yum install zlib-devel libtool autoconf -ysudo yum install systemd-devel ncurses-devel ncurses-compat-libs -y

For Debian/Ubuntu use the following instead:

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

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.xztar -xf cabal-install-3.2.0.0-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.xzrm cabal-install-3.2.0.0-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.xz cabal.sigmkdir -p ~/.local/binmv cabal ~/.local/bin/

Verify that .local/bin is in your PATH

echo $PATH

If .local/bin is not in the PATH, you need to add the following line to your .bashrcfile

Navigate to your home folder:

cd

Open your .bashrc file with nano editor

nano .bashrc

Go to the bottom of the file and add the following lines

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

You need to restart your server or source your .bashrc file

source .bashrc

Update cabal

cabal update

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

cabal --version

Download and install GHC:#

For Debian/Ubuntu systems:

wget https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.10.2/ghc-8.10.2-x86_64-deb9-linux.tar.xztar -xf ghc-8.10.2-x86_64-deb9-linux.tar.xzrm ghc-8.10.2-x86_64-deb9-linux.tar.xzcd ghc-8.10.2./configuresudo make installcd ..

For CentOS/RHEL systems:

wget https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.10.2/ghc-8.10.2-x86_64-centos7-linux.tar.xztar -xf ghc-8.10.2-x86_64-centos7-linux.tar.xzrm ghc-8.10.2-x86_64-centos7-linux.tar.xzcd ghc-8.10.2./configuresudo make installcd ..

Alternatively, the ghcup tool can be used to install and set several versions of GHC:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://get-ghcup.haskell.org | shghcup upgradeghcup install <VERSION>ghcup set <VERSION>

<VERSION> here could be for example 8.10.2

You can check that your default GHC version has been properly set:


ghc --version

Install Libsodium#

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
git clone https://github.com/input-output-hk/libsodiumcd libsodiumgit checkout 66f017f1./autogen.sh./configuremakesudo make install

Download the source code for cardano-node#


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

This creates the folder cardano-node and downloads the latest source code.

After the download has finished, we can check its content by

ls cardano-node

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

cd cardano-node

For reproducible builds, we should check out a specific release, a specific "tag". For the Shelley Testnet, we will use tag 1.24.2, which we can check out as follows:

git fetch --all --tagsgit taggit checkout tags/1.24.2

Build and install the node#

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

cabal cleancabal updatecabal build all

Now we can copy the executables files to the .local/bin directory

cp -p dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.10.2/cardano-node-1.24.2/x/cardano-node/build/cardano-node/cardano-node ~/.local/bin/
cp -p dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.10.2/cardano-cli-1.24.2/x/cardano-cli/build/cardano-cli/cardano-cli ~/.local/bin/
cardano-cli --version

If you need to update to a newer version follow the steps below:#

cd cardano-nodegit fetch --all --tagsgit taggit checkout tags/<the-tag-you-want>cabal updatecabal build cardano-node cardano-cli

This is a good time to backup your current binaries (in case you have to revert to an earlier version). Something like this will work:

cd ~/.local/binmv cardano-cli cardano-cli-backupmv cardano-node cardano-node-backup

Now copy your newly built binaries to the appropriate directory, with:

cp -p dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.10.2/cardano-node-<NEW VERSION>/x/cardano-node/build/cardano-node/cardano-node ~/.local/bin/
cp -p dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-linux/ghc-8.10.2/cardano-cli-<NEW VERSION>/x/cardano-cli/build/cardano-cli/cardano-cli ~/.local/bin/
note

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