Get started creating Ethereum development and test single and multi-node clusters rapidly using Docker.
Private Ethereum networks aren't terribly difficult to setup. However bootstrapping that network can be a little difficult and there is a nice monitoring addon to ensure everything is working as expected in your network.
- Setting up initial "users" can be difficult, generating a wallet id, secret, etc.
- Monitoring is more difficult than expected, test nodes need a "sidecar" type service that pushes their current status to a monitoring platform
- A visual representation of the network is really cool to see.
We provide full Ethereum test nodes (using the Ethereum Go client with all APIs enabled by default as well as a monitoring dashboard (for the cluster version) provided via Netstats.
This service uses the very popular docker to run geth in a consistent environment: https://www.docker.com/get-docker
It also uses docker-compose to create our containers and orchestrate their deployment: https://docs.docker.com/compose/
To run a single test Ethereum node run the following:
$ docker-compose -f docker-compose-standalone.yml up -d
You should be able to get to the JSON RPC client by browsing to:
http://localhost:8545 # See below if using Docker for Mac/Windows
To run an Ethereum Docker cluster run the following:
$ docker-compose up -d
By default this will create:
- 1 Ethereum Bootstrapped container
- 1 Ethereum container (which connects to the bootstrapped container on launch)
- 1 Netstats container (with a Web UI to view activity in the cluster)
To access the Netstats Web UI:
http://localhost:3000
You can scale the number of Ethereum nodes by running:
docker-compose scale eth=3
This will scale the number of Ethereum nodes upwards (replace 3 with however many nodes you prefer). These nodes will connect to the P2P network (via the bootstrap node) by default.
As part of the bootstrapping process we bootstrap 10 Ethereum accounts for use pre-filled with 20 Ether for use in transactions by default.
If you want to change the amount of Ether for those accounts
See files/genesis.json.
To get attached to the geth JavaScript console on the node you can run the following
docker exec -it ethereumdocker_eth_1 geth attach ipc://root/.ethereum/devchain/geth.ipc
Then you can miner.start(), and then check to see if it's mining by inspecting web3.eth.mining.
See the Javascript Runtime docs for more.
To speed up the process, you can use a pre-generated DAG. All you need to do is add something like this
ADD dag/full-R23-0000000000000000 /root/.ethash/full-R23-0000000000000000
to the monitored-geth-client Dockerfile.
Docker on Mac and Window actually requires a separate Linux kernel running in order run the docker containers. What that ends up being typically is a virtual machine with a different IP address than your localhost address. You can fetch the address and open are url by running, for example:
open http://$(docker-machine ip default):8545
TestRPC - https://github.com/ethereumjs/testrpc