/blockstack-core

The reference implementation of Blockstack

Primary LanguagePythonGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

Blockstack Core

PyPI Slack

Blockstack is a new decentralized internet where you own your data and your apps run locally without remote servers.

Blockstack provides decentralized services for naming/DNS, identity, authentication and storage. Developers can use JavaScript libraries to build serverless apps and they don't need to worry about managing infrastructure.

For more info on Blockstack see: http://github.com/blockstack/blockstack

Blockstack Core is the reference implementation of Blockstack. It is responsible for processing blockchain transactions, creating virtualchain state, and building the peer network amongst other things. Blockstack Core provides a RESTful interface for clients and also comes with a command-line-interface (CLI).

Table of Contents

Installing Blockstack

There are two major supported methods for installing blockstack: our apt repo or a pip install.

pip Installation

You should use pip2 if you have it instead of pip. Blockstack is built against Python 2.7.

For Mac:

# Install blockstack
$ pip2 install blockstack --upgrade

For Debian & Ubuntu:

# Install dependancies
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y python-pip python-dev libssl-dev libffi-dev rng-tools libgmp3-dev
$ sudo pip2 install pyparsing

# Install blockstack
$ sudo pip2 install blockstack --upgrade

For SUSE and openSUSE:

# Install dependancies
$ sudo zypper update && zypper install rng-tools gcc python-devel python2-pip libffi-devel libopenssl-devel

# Install blockstack
$ sudo pip install blockstack --upgrade

To install the blockstack-browser, follow the instructions over on the repository.

apt Installation

# Add our apt repository
$ wget -qO - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blockstack/packaging/master/repo-key.pub | sudo apt-key add -
$ echo "echo 'deb http://packages.blockstack.com/repositories/ubuntu/ xenial main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/blockstack.list" | sudo -E bash -

# Install blockstack
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install blockstack

To install the blockstack-browser, follow the instructions over on the repository.

Setting up your install

If this is your first time installing blockstack first run blockstack setup and follow the prompts. Use the defaults for all of the options.

NOTE: This process generates a wallet. BE SURE TO SAVE THE WALLET PASSWORD YOU TYPE IN.

Next you need to start the blockstack api server:

$ blockstack api start

Now, you can test your installation by trying:

$ blockstack info

which should display the last block processed and the latest consensus hash.

Running a blockstack-core instance

After installation, you can (optionally) do a fast-sync that quickly syncs a local blockstack-core node with the Atlas network:

# Download the Atlas snapshot
$ blockstack-core --debug fast_sync http://fast-sync.blockstack.org/snapshot.bsk

And start Blockstack Core to index the blockchain:

# To start the server
$ blockstack-core --debug start

# Read the server logs
$ tail -f ~/.blockstack-server/blockstack-server.log

Next, visit the basic usage docs and extended usage docs to learn how to register names of your own, as well as transfer them and associate data with them.

If you encounter any technical issues in installing or using Blockstack, please search the open issues and start a new one if your issue is not covered.

Support for Integration Tests and Regtest Environment

Our integration test suite allows you to easily get a regtest environment up and running with Blockstack, and the above apt package includes the suite. However, you'll need to install bitcoind and sqlite3 for the tests to execute properly. For that you'll need to add bitcoin's PPA (or install it otherwise).

$ sudo apt install software-properties-common
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install sqlite3 bitcoind

Development Status

v0.14.2 is the current stable release of Blockstack Core (available on the master branch).
v0.14.3 is the next release candidate for Blockstack Core (available on the v0.14.3 branch).

Most of the development is happening in the v0.14.3 branch. Please submit all pull requests to that branch.

In the list of release notes you can find what has changed in these versions.

Blockstack Docs

You can learn more by visiting the Blockstack Website and checking out the in-depth articles and documentation:

You can also read the Blockstack paper:

If you have high-level questions about Blockstack, try searching our forum and start a new question if your question is not answered there.

API Docs

A local core node will expose a RESTful API after starting the api with blockstack api start. Documentation for that lives here, which is generated from blueprint markdown here.

Contributing

We welcome any small or big contributions! Please take a moment to review the guidelines for contributing to open source in order to make the contribution process easy and effective for everyone involved.

Developers: You can try out Blockstack Core in a local sandbox using our integration test framework.

You can install the latest release candidate by:

$ git clone https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-core.git
$ blockstack-core/images/scripts/debian-release-candidate.sh

Community

We have an active community of developers and the best place to interact with the community is:

Copyright and License

The code and documentation copyright are attributed to blockstack.org for the year of 2017.

This code is released under the GPL v3 license, and the docs are released under the Creative Commons license.