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Connecting to the Network
In this section, we'll connect to the Mainnet network and send our first transaction. Let's first start up the node so that we can begin issuing commands.
Update your software
The first step in connecting to Mainnet is installing the latest daemon version. Follow the instructions for your operating system below.
Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 / Debian 9, 10, 11
Follow along below to install the latest Stable Mina Release 1.3.1.2 or visit the Github Releases Page to discover and install pre-release (Beta) builds.
You can set up the new stable package repository and install the latest version as follows:
echo "deb [trusted=yes] http://packages.o1test.net $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mina.list
sudo apt-get install --yes apt-transport-https
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --yes curl unzip mina-mainnet=1.3.1.2-25388a0
Check that daemon installed correctly by running mina version. The output should read Commit 25388a0fed9695e8e9d04f75f50c2bae1c9c80db on branch master.
Start up a node
Since this technology is still relatively new, there are a few rare situations where your node can run into some issues. We don't want for your nodes to break and you not realize! So we've made some officially supported auto-restart flows for you. We'll be iterating on these in future releases.
However, first we'll want to make sure everything works by running it manually before starting with the auto-restart flows.
Note: If you are using the Hetzner hosting provider, we are currently experiencing an issue where Hetzner believes our software is being malicious. See the Networking section of the troubleshooting page to learn how to mitigate this before starting a node.
Run the following command to start up a Mina node instance and connect to the live network:
mina daemon --peer-list-url https://storage.googleapis.com/mina-seed-lists/mainnet_seeds.txt
If you have a key with stake and would like to produce blocks, also provide --block-producer-key ~/keys/my-wallet, replacing ~/keys/my-wallet with the path to your private key if not the default.
The --peer-list argument specified above refer to the seed peer address - this is the initial peer we will connect to on the network. Since Mina is a peer-to-peer protocol, there is no single centralized server we rely on.
See here for common issues when first running a node.
You're not done yet! Now that you've confirmed things are okay by running the standalone process, it is important we start Mina in a manner that will auto-restart itself when it dies.
First kill the existing mina daemon process with Ctrl-C, and then keep reading:
Creating your .mina-env
To produce blocks or otherwise customize the configuration for the mina daemon, create a file ~/.mina-env containing the following:
MINA_PRIVKEY_PASS="My_V3ry_S3cure_Password"
LOG_LEVEL=Info
FILE_LOG_LEVEL=Debug
EXTRA_FLAGS=" --block-producer-key <BLOCK_PRODUCER_KEY_PATH>"
Ensure to replace <BLOCK_PRODUCER_KEY_PATH> with the full path to your block producer private key, for example, /home/ubuntu/keys/my-wallet.
If you do not intend to produce blocks then you can keep ~/.mina-env empty for now.
To change how mina is configured, simply specify flags to the mina daemon process with space-separated arguments between the quotes in EXTRA_FLAGS="".
The mina systemd service no longer expects a peers.txt file, it just uses the PEER_LIST_URL variable to determine where to fetch initial peers from, and the PEER_LIST_URL for the mainnet package defaults to https://storage.googleapis.com/mina-seed-lists/mainnet_seeds.txt .
Once your .mina-env is ready, run the following commands to start up a Mina node instance and connect to the live network:
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user start mina
systemctl --user enable mina
sudo loginctl enable-linger
These commands will allow the node to continue running after you logout, and restart automatically when the machine reboots.
By default, the node connects to the network using the default external-port of 8302. This can be changed using the -external-port flag, just add that to EXTRA_FLAGS.
You can also look into the mina process itself that's running in the background and auto-restarting.
This command will let you know if mina had any trouble getting started.
systemctl --user status mina
You can stop mina gracefully, and stop automatically-restarting the service:
systemctl --user stop mina
Manually Restart it:
systemctl --user restart mina
And look at logs:
journalctl --user -u mina -n 1000 -f
In some cases in order to view logs you need to run the following command instead:
journalctl --user-unit mina -n 1000 -f
That command will show you the last 1000 lines and follow from there.
Docker
When running your daemon using Docker, first ensure that your private key has the correct permissions.
cd ~
chmod 700 ~/keys
chmod 600 ~/keys/my-wallet
mkdir ~/.mina-config
To produce blocks or otherwise customize the configuration for the mina daemon, create a file ~/.mina-env containing the following:
export MINA_PRIVKEY_PASS="My_V3ry_S3cure_Password"
LOG_LEVEL=Info
FILE_LOG_LEVEL=Debug
EXTRA_FLAGS=" --block-producer-key <BLOCK_PRODUCER_KEY_PATH>"
PEER_LIST_URL=https://storage.googleapis.com/mina-seed-lists/mainnet_seeds.txt
Ensure to replace <BLOCK_PRODUCER_KEY_PATH> with the full path to your block producer private key, for example, /home/ubuntu/keys/my-wallet.
If you do not intend to produce blocks then you can keep ~/.mina-env empty except for the PEER_LIST_URL.
Now simply run the image with your keys, ~/.mina-env, and ~/.mina-config mounted into the container:
docker run --name mina -d \
-p 8302:8302 \
--restart=always \
--mount "type=bind,source=$(pwd)/.mina-env,dst=/entrypoint.d/mina-env,readonly" \
--mount "type=bind,source=$(pwd)/keys,dst=/keys,readonly" \
--mount "type=bind,source=$(pwd)/.mina-config,dst=/root/.mina-config" \
minaprotocol/mina-daemon:1.3.1.2-25388a0-bullseye-mainnet \
daemon
Run docker logs -f mina to follow the logs, and if it crashes save the log output to a file with docker logs mina > mina-log.txt and post the output to the #mentor-nodes channel on Mina Protocol Discord or attach the full ~/.mina-config/mina.log to a GitHub issue and link the issue in discord.
Run docker exec -it mina mina client status to monitor connectivity to the network, you should quickly find at least 10 peers and watch the block height / max observed block height climb.
If you encounter [Warn] Shutdown before Mina instance was created, not saving a visualization when attempting to run your Docker container, increase the resources that the Docker container is allowed to use.
Checking connectivity
Now that we've started up a node and are running the Mina daemon, open up another shell and run the following command:
mina client status
It may take up to a minute before mina client status connects to the daemon when first starting up. So if you see Error: daemon not running. See mina daemon, just a wait a bit and try again.
Most likely we will see a response that include the fields below:
...
Peers: Total: 4 (...)
...
Sync Status: Bootstrap
If you see Sync Status: Bootstrap, this means that the node is bootstrapping and needs to sync with the rest of the network. You may need to be patient here as this step might take some time for the node to get all the data it needs.
After a while, your node should connect to more peers and then should move into Sync Status: Catchup, which means we're gathering the most recent blocks and state trying to catch up the the highest block.
When sync status reaches Synced and the node is connected to 1 or more peers, we will have successfully connected to the network. We will also see a corresponding daemon log once we've synced: [Info] Mina daemon is now synced.
If you the Bootstrap state persists for more than an hour, there may be an issue with your port configuration.
Stepping up your game
Now that we have a fully synced node, we can learn about some of the more advanced features of the daemon such as Sending a payment and Staking & Delegating. And if you want to earn more tokens, check out the Foundation Delegation Program.