Hello, friend! Welcome to Cantofornia! This guide is intended for people who are new to Canto and want to run a personal node. It is not written for people who are already running a node. If you are already running a node, you probably don't need this guide.
This is meant to be a friendly and informal how-to for network hobbyists, community members, and anyone else who wants to quickly set up a node for personal use.
If you have any more advanced questions, feel free to ask them in the Canto Cult Telegram group. You can also DM me on Twitter.
Although I am a core contributor to the project, I do not speak for the community.
Before we dive into the technical details, let's quickly go over the basics of the Canto community.
Canto is a permissionless, general-purpose blockchain running the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
It was built using the Cosmos SDK, which is a framework for building blockchains.
One of the primary goals of Canto, as an experimental project, is to provide an alternative financial system that is easy to use and understand. The reason I do what I do is to build systems that enable decentralized finance (DeFi) services for the world in a manner that ensures consent, privacy, and equitable access to anyone who would want to join and participate within the community.
Now, let's dive into the technical details.
* A computer or VM with a 64-bit operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc.)
* At least 2GB of RAM
* At least 10GB of free disk space
* A broadband internet connection
* A static IP address (optional, but recommended)
* A Canto wallet (optional, but recommended)
I am setting up a node on a VM that I have deployed on Google Cloud Platform. I'm using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I have selected a general-purpose e2-standard-4 VM with 4 vCPUs, 16GB of RAM, and 300GB of disk space. If you require high perfomance, I would recommend running NVME SSDs, but for the purpose of this guide, I'm using standard persistent disks. The total monthly cost for a VM with this configuration is approximately $127.84, or about $0.18 hourly.
Network Type: Mainnet
Chain ID: canto_7700-1
Current Node Version: v5.0.0.
Included in this repository is a simple bash script that will install all of the necessary dependencies, set up your node, and configure everything needed to get going.
Git clone this repository to your home directory and then navigate to the folder once it's successfully cloned.
From the $HOME/canto-node-primer folder, run chmod 700 setup.sh to make the bash script an executable file.
Before running the script, edit the canto.service file and replace INSERT_YOUR_USERNAME_HERE with your username on line 7. If you're on a VM, you can edit the file from your CLI by running vim canto.service. If you're not sure what your username is, just run the command echo $USER, which will return your username.
Make sure your go version is >= 1.18 and correctly configured
Then run ./setup.sh and let the script work its magic.
The sync process shouldn't take very long because we leverage state-sync functionality which is pulled from a node operated by the Polkachu team. By default, your node will run as a full node. This means it will maintain historical state and also validate whether or not a transaction was confirmed by the network, but if your application requires specific historical events, you'll need an archive node, which takes a much longer time to sync and demands a higher amount of computational resources.
If you plan on interacting with the node often, it might make more sense to run the application in a tmux window as opposed to a systemd service. This will allow you to interact with your node's command line interface without running the risk of halting the application process.