Running Nodes

Run a Gossamer Node

To run default Gossamer node, first initialise the node. This writes the genesis state to the database.

./bin/gossamer --chain westend-dev init

The gossamer node runs as an authority by default. The built-in authorities are alice, bob, charlie, dave, eve, ferdie, george, and ian. To start the node as an authority, provide it with a built-in key:

./bin/gossamer --chain westend-dev --key alice

The node will not build blocks every slot by default; it will appear that the node is doing nothing, but it is actually waiting for a slot to build a block. If you wish to force it to build blocks every slot, you update the [core] section of chain/gssmr/config.toml to the following:

[core]
roles = 4
babe-authority = true
grandpa-authority = true

Then, re-run the above steps. NOTE: this feature is for testing only; if you wish to change the BABE block production parameters, you need to create a modified runtime.

If you wish to run the default node as a non-authority, you can specify roles=1:

./bin/gossamer --chain westend-dev --roles 1 --base-path /tmp/gossamer

Run Kusama Node

To run a Kusama node, first initialise the node:

./bin/gossamer --chain kusama init --base-path /tmp/gossamer

Then run the node selecting the Kusama chain:

./bin/gossamer --chain kusama --base-path /tmp/gossamer

The node may not appear to do anything for the first minute or so (it's bootstrapping to the network.) If you wish to see what is it doing in this time, you can turn on debug logs in chain/kusama/config.toml:

[log]
network = "debug"

After it's finished bootstrapping, the node should begin to sync.

Run Polkadot Node

Initialise polkadot node:

./bin/gossamer init --chain polkadot --base-path /tmp/gossamer

Start polkadot node:

./bin/gossamer --chain polkadot --base-path /tmp/gossamer

Run Gossamer Node with Docker

Gossamer can also be installed on GNU/Linux, MacOS systems with Docker.

Dependencies

• Install the latest release of Docker

Ensure you are running the most recent version of Docker by issuing the command:

docker -v

Pull the latest Gossamer images from DockerHub Registry:

docker pull chainsafe/gossamer:latest

The above command will install all required dependencies.

Next, we need override the default entrypoint so we can run the node as an authority node

docker run -it --entrypoint /bin/bash chainsafe/gossamer:latest

The built-in authorities are alice, bob, charlie, dave, eve, ferdie, george, and ian. To start the node as an authority, provide it with a built-in key:

./bin/gossamer --chain gssmr --key alice